Using a recent result from the program evaluation literature, the author demonstrates that the interpretation of regression estimates of between-group differences in wages and other economic outcomes depends on the relative sizes of subpopulations under study. When the disadvantaged group is small, regression estimates are similar to the average loss for disadvantaged individuals. When this group is a numerical majority, regression estimates are similar to the average gain for advantaged individuals. The author analyzes racial test score gaps using ECLS-K data and racial wage gaps using CPS, NLSY79, and NSW data, and shows that the interpretation of regression estimates varies substantially across data sets. Methodologically, he develops a new version of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, in which the unexplained component recovers a parameter referred to as the average outcome gap. Under additional assumptions, this estimand is equivalent to the average treatment effect. Finally, the author reinterprets the Reimers, Cotton, and Fortin decompositions in the context of the program evaluation literature, with attention to the limitations of these approaches.

Large-scale labour migration is considered a recent phenomenon in most European countries; however, immigrants have been an integral part of the French labour-force nearly as long as in the United States. Numerous studies document Sub-Saharan African immigrants’ employment and wage disadvantages in France; however, few investigate an important aspect of Sub-Saharan African immigrants’ integration – occupational segregation. Using 2011 French census data, I examine Sub-Saharan African immigrants’ occupational segregation. I find that all immigrants are concentrated, but only Sub-Saharan Africans are concentrated in low-skilled work regardless of citizenship. Department-level regression analyses measuring occupational segregation show that after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, Sub-Saharan Africans are most segregated. Control variables explain less of Sub-Saharan African women’s segregation than any other group indicating that they experience more discrimination in the labour market than even Sub-Saharan African men. Future research using longitudinal data is needed to determine if these results reflect a persistent disadvantage.

We introduce efficient formulas that dramatically decrease the computational time of CR2VE and CR3VE, the cluster-robust estimators of standard errors with few clusters, and of the Imbens and Kolesar (2016) degrees of freedom. We also introduce CR3VE-λ, an estimator that is unbiased under more general conditions than CR3VE as it takes cluster unbalancedness into account. We illustrate these refinements by empirical simulations.

Background COVID-19 is a novel infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease was first identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has since spread globally, resulting in a pandemic. The COVID-19 epidemic has had tragic human consequences felt beyond China and other infected countries. In addition from being a human tragedy, COVID-19 is also an economic tragedy. Evidence of the catastrophic impacts of COVID-19 is by now voluminous (studies in general, not only econ). For instance, a preliminary UN's trade and development agency, UNCTAD downside scenario expects a $2 trillion shortfall in global income with a $US220 billion hit to developing countries (excluding China) (https://unctad.org/en/pages/newsdetails.aspx?OriginalVersionID=2300). Research Questions The central questions in this paper are: (1) What are the short-term impacts of COVID-19 on employment and wages? (2) Are there larger effects for states with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths? (3) Do the economic consequences vary across demographic groups, union status, and immigration status? (4) What are the short-term impacts of COVID-19 on self-employed workers? (5) Are there larger effects for relatively more “risky” occupations? (6) Are there smaller effects for individuals in occupations who can easily work from home? To answer (5) and (6), we built indexes using data on exposure to disease, physical proximity to other people and how easily occupations can work from home using pre-COVID-19 data on method of transportation to work.

Within three days of arriving on campus at Harvard College in August, Erick Torres-Gonzalez, a first-year student, was registered to vote. A student group called the Harvard Votes Challenge helped him fill out a new-voter form for Wisconsin, his home state. Volunteers walked him through the US presidential election process during an orientation program Torres-Gonzalez attended for new students from low-income and minority backgrounds. Many students there were the first in their families to attend college. In November, Torres-Gonzalez, who is 19, will also be the first in his family to vote.

Once nearly eighty percent Black, South LA is now two-thirds Latino. The demographic change was due to many factors, including a Black exodus driven by economic precarity, fear of crime, and experiences of over-policing and a Latino influx initially spurred by an immigration surge that could not be accommodated in traditional entry neighborhoods. While earlier research often focused on the conflicts between groups, time has passed and our new work points to contemporary quotidian accommodations between residents. We also document an emerging style of Black-Brown community organizing that seeks to both acknowledge the nuance of difference and create a shared sense of place identity. This article lifts up the Black experience in that transition of space and politics and notes how a sense of loss can result from such a dramatic change in a place that was once an iconic and literal home for much of Black Los Angeles. We suggest that that sense of loss is exacerbated by a legacy of racist asset-stripping and a deep worry about Black erasure due to current displacement pressures from gentrification. We close by discussing how organizers and political leaders need to take these dynamics into account when both building coalitions and ensuring Black futures in what is now a Black-Brown political and social space.

Using data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses and the American Community Survey five-year sample for 2006–2010, we examine the impacts of immigration inflows on the migration patterns of co-ethnic natives in the United States. We explore whether the outcomes are driven by changes in labor market returns in the receiving cities or sociocultural benefits of being surrounded by co-ethnics. We find that a higher ethnicity-specific immigrant population share within a city increases the population share of both co-ethnic natives who remain in the receiving cities and co-ethnic natives who migrate into these cities, relative to natives of other ancestries. All baseline results survive robustness and falsification tests, and instrumental variable estimations. Through the heterogeneous effects, we find that the sociocultural benefits, such as language and ethnic goods that immigrants bring to receiving cities, are the potential channels that attract co-ethnic natives to migrate towards those enclaves.

Skills that are difficult to automate are expected to increase in demand and reward according to skill-biased technological change advocates, who have identified high rewards for cognitive and social skills. However, such broad skill categories involve numerous essential competencies that can be differentially rewarded or go simply unrewarded. Using US data, this article analyses the demand for and payment of linguistic competency, a cross-cutting kind of skill that is basic for both cognitive and social work in the new economy and is one of the human capacities that is most difficult to automate. While human capital theory predicts an increase in wages as the demand for linguistic skills rises, from cultural/institutional perspectives, it can be theorised that communicative abilities and foreign-language knowledge are socially undervalued because of their association with feminised activities, ethnicity, and low-status service jobs. We analyse the demand and reward for linguistic skills through a two-step analysis of occupational and individual data derived from two sources: the Occupational Information Network and the Current Population Survey. Results show that while ‘hard’ verbal-reasoning skills are associated with high average salaries, as is predicted by neoclassical theory, the potentially undervalued linguistic skills – interactive and multilingual skills – are unrewarded and even penalised. This evidence requires further political attention, given its implications for large number of workers, especially in feminised, low-status service jobs.

Growing costs of prescription medication are leading to increased purchases of prescriptions abroad. Yet there is a research gap of factors associated with this practice by nativity and race/ethnicity. We analyzed the 2017 National Health Interview Survey (n = 26,488). The outcome was whether the respondent purchased prescription medications from another country to save money in the past 12 months. Predictors were drawn from Andersen’s healthcare utilization model. We used logistic regression models to examine factors associated with purchases by nativity and race/ethnicity. Foreign-born and Hispanic respondents showed a higher rate of purchasing medications abroad compared to their US-born and non-Hispanic white counterparts. Foreign-born respondents who are uninsured, who have no usual place of healthcare, who have difficulty finding a doctor, and who have lived in the US for less than 10 years were more likely to buy medications abroad. Different racial/ethnic groups differed on associated enabling factors. Need factor was significantly associated only with Hispanics’ purchase of medications abroad. Our research reveals the need for health education regarding the safety and the illegality of this behavior, especially among recent and Hispanic immigrants.

With women now comprising nearly half of the labor force, the career decisions that both genders make hold much greater significance. The current paper will focus on one of their most crucial career decisions: when they choose to exit the labor force. This paper investigates whether there are gender-based differences in the probability of retirement. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) provided by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, results show that the odds of being retired are much higher if you are female. This paper aims to investigate what factors may lead to one’s retirement, and whether these factors are the same when analyzing results by gender. With women making up a significantly greater percentage of those entering and exiting the labor market, this paper will specifically consider when and why women are choosing to retire when they do.

Several states initiated school finance reform during the post-1990s, commonly named the “adequacy” era, with the primary purpose of providing adequate funding for low-income school districts. This paper uses the space-time variation in court-ordered reforms in this period as a shock to school spending and investigates its effects on juvenile arrest rates and risky behaviors. Using a 2SLS-DDD approach and a wide range of datasets, I find that exposure to reform reduces the juvenile arrest rates, increases the likelihood of high school graduation, increases the time spent on the educational activity, and reduces risky behaviors at schools. A 10% rise in real per-pupil spending is associated with 7.1 fewer arrests per 1,000 in a population aged 15-19. This rise is equivalent to a reduction of roughly 90,113 arrests annually. It also implies a minimum of 16% social externality in school spending.

In 1924, the Morton Salt Company began nationwide distribution of iodine-fortified salt. Access to iodine, a key determinant of cognitive ability, rose sharply. We compare outcomes for cohorts exposed in utero with those of slightly older, unexposed cohorts, across states with high versus low baseline iodine deficiency. Income increased by 11%, labor force participation rose 0.68 percentage points, and full-time work went up 0.9 percentage points due to increased iodine availability. These impacts were largely driven by changes in the economic outcomes of young women. In later adulthood, both men and women had higher family incomes due to iodization.

We examine whether employment discrimination increased after the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We submitted fictitious applications to publicly advertised positions using resumes that are manipulated on perceived race and ethnicity (Somali American, African American, and white American). Prior to the 2016 election, employers contacted Somali American applicants slightly less than white applicants but more than African American applicants. After the election, the difference between white and Somali American applicants increased by 8 percentage points. The increased discrimination predominantly occurred in occupations involving interaction with customers. We continued data collection from July 2017 to March 2018 to test for seasonality in discrimination; there was no substantial increase in discrimination after the 2017 election.

Based on the extensive work of Gary Orfield and others, scholars and the legal practitioners have long known that across the United States, significant resegregation of public-school districts is occurring rapidly as states debate new modes of student assignment, increase charter school offerings, and the Supreme Court loosens rules for removing the taint of discrimination in public education. However, we lack systematic knowledge of how resegregation is being counteracted and the factors contributing to the choice of school districts to adopt voluntary desegregation plans. This empirical study attempts to fill that void. We found sixty experimental school districts that meet our strict criteria for voluntary adoption of school desegregation policies. Using student enrollment size at the school district level, we selected fifty-nine contiguous control districts that have not adopted voluntary desegregation plans for inclusion in our study. We relied on multiple analytical methods to examine the data, including correlation and logistic regression. Our findings highlight the importance of both institutional and contextual conditions in a school district’s choice of voluntary adoption of desegregation plans. Institutional factors such as the number of schools in the district, the history of court-ordered desegregation, and contextual conditions such as the proportion of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch and the race and ethnicity of students significantly explains whether a school district would adopt voluntary integration policies. We discuss the implications of our findings within the context of a Supreme Court and polity that remain split about the worthiness of school desegregation.

With women now comprising nearly half of the labor force, the career decisions that both genders make hold much greater significance. The current paper will focus on one of their most crucial career decisions: when they choose to exit the labor force. This paper investigates whether there are gender-based differences in the probability of retirement. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) provided by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, results show that the odds of being retired are much higher if you are female. This paper aims to investigate what factors may lead to one’s retirement, and whether these factors are the same when analyzing results by gender. With women making up a significantly greater percentage of those entering and exiting the labor market, this paper will specifically consider when and why women are choosing to retire when they do.

The large inflow of less-educated immigrants that the United States has received in recent decades can worsen or improve U.S. natives’ labor market opportunities. Although there is a general consensus that low-skilled immigrants tend to hold “worse” jobs than U.S. natives, the impact of immigration on U.S. natives’ working conditions has received little attention. This study examines how immigration affected U.S. natives’ occupational exposure to workplace hazards and the return to such exposure over 1990 to 2018. The results indicate that immigration causes less-educated U.S. natives’ exposure to workplace hazards to fall, and instrumental variables results show a larger impact among women than among men. The compensating differential paid for hazard exposure appears to fall as well, but not after accounting for immigration-induced changes in the returns to occupational skills.

While interest in African economic history has grown rapidly in recent years, the continent’s post-colonial past remains understudied. This is at least in part because of the decline and fragmentation in the publication of economic statistics after decolonization, which has limited the type and breadth of quantitative analysis that can be undertaken. Nonetheless, this note argues that there are comparatively untapped post-colonial data sources that could enrich the study of the continent's economic history. The note surveys some of these sources and data repositories and provides advice, based on the author’s own experiences, on how to utilize them.

Changes in fertility patterns are hypothesized to be among the many second-order consequences of armed conflict, but expectations about the direction of such effects are theoretically ambiguous. Prior research, from a range of contexts, has also yielded inconsistent results. We contribute to this debate by using harmonized data and methods to examine the effects of exposure to conflict on preferred and realized fertility outcomes across a spatially and temporally extensive population. We use high-resolution georeferenced data from 25 sub-Saharan African countries, combining records of violent events from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset with survey data on fertility goals and outcomes from the Demographic and Health Surveys (n=368,785 women aged 15-49 years). We employ a series of linear and logistic regression models to estimate the effects of exposure to conflict events within a 10-kilometer radius of respondents’ communities on ideal family size and the probability of childbearing within the past 12 months. We find that exposure to armed conflict is significantly associated with reductions in both respondents’ preferred family size and their probability of recent childbearing. Many of these effects are heterogeneous between demographic groups and across contexts, which suggests systematic differences in women’s vulnerability and demographic responses to armed conflict. Additional analyses suggest that conflict-related fertility declines may be driven by delays or reductions in marriage. These results contribute generalizable evidence about the demographic effects of conflict and their underlying mechanisms and underline the importance of studying the secondorder effects of violent conflict on vulnerable populations.

Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the ‘housing as opportunity’ school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations represent a fundamental barrier to economic development. Housing shortages are considered to limit migration into thriving cities, curtailing their expansion potential, generating rising social and spatial inequalities and inhibiting national growth. According to this dominant view, relaxing zoning and other planning regulations in the most prosperous cities is crucial to unleash the economic potential of cities and nations and to facilitate within-country migration. In this article, we contend that the bulk of the claims of the housing as opportunity approach are fundamentally flawed and lead to simplistic and misguided policy recommendations. We posit that there is no clear and uncontroversial evidence that housing regulation is a principal source of differences in home availability or prices across cities. Blanket changes in zoning are unlikely to increase domestic migration or to improve affordability for lower-income households in prosperous areas. They would, however, increase gentrification within metropolitan areas and would not appreciably decrease income inequality. In contrast to the housing models, we argue that the basic motors of all these features of the economy are the current geography of employment, wages and skills.

Over the last few decades, marriage and childbearing have become less tightly linked (Hayford, Guzzo, & Smock, 2014), and cohabitation has contributed to high levels of non-marital childbearing (Lichter, Sassler, & Turner, 2014). Understanding the links between cohabitation, marriage, and childbearing behaviors is complicated given delays in the timing of both union formation and fertility. Consequently, focusing on union and childbearing characteristics of women at the end of the reproductive years may provide novel insights. In this profile, we use data from the Current Population Survey’s biennial June Fertility Supplement from 2000 (when cohabitation data were first collected) through 2018 to analyze current union status and the distribution of the number of children ever born (one, two, three, or four or more) for women aged 40-44. Information on trends in the number of children ever born by educational attainment and race-ethnicity is presented in a companion profile FP-20-04, and information on differentials in age at first birth in 2018 is discussed in FP-20-06.