Emigrants from Italy and Ireland contributed disproportionately to the Age of Mass Migration. That their departure improved the living standards of those they left behind is hardly in doubt. Nevertheless, a voluminous literature on the selectivity of migrant flows— both from sending and receiving country perspectives—has given rise to claims that migration generates both ‘brain drains’ and ‘brain gains’. On the one hand, positive or negative selection among emigrants may affect the level of human capital in sending countries. On the other hand, the prospect of emigration and return migration may both spur investment in schooling in source countries. This essay describes the history of emigration from Italy and Ireland during the Age of Mass Migration from these perspectives.

This paper studies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes. We improve the joint measurement of labor market outcomes and prescription rates in the rural areas where nearly 30 percent of the US population lives. We fi nd that increasing the local prescription rate by 10 percent decreases the prime-age employment rate by 0.50 percentage points for men and 0.17 percentage points for women. This eff ect is larger for white men with less than a BA (0.70 percentage points) and largest for minority men with less than a BA (1.01 percentage points). Geography is an obstacle to giving a causal interpretation to these results, especially since they were estimated in the midst of a large recession and recovery that generated considerable crosssectional variation in local economic performance. We show that our results are not sensitive to most approaches to controlling for places experiencing either contemporaneous labor market shocks or persistently weak labor market conditions. We also present evidence on reverse causality, fi nding that a short-term unemployment shock did not increase the share of people abusing prescription opioids. Our estimates imply that prescription opioids can account for 44 percent of the realized national decrease in men’s labor force participation between 2001 and 2015.

The present paper has the goal to document the usage of the Romans 1by1, a database which records the people attested in the epigraphic sources coming from the Roman provinces; so far, we have registered Dacia, Moesia Inferior and Moesia Superior in full and are currently working on the epigraphy of Pannonia. The information started to be collected in 2015, and it is still in progress, the intention being to extend the geographical area as much as possible. The database represents an extremely useful resource in the study of ancient population, as well as a very user- friendly research tool, which allows primary browsing and selective, advanced searches alike.

Cenni storici sull'innovazione e il suo impatto sull'industria. Interazione tra automazione e occupazione. Polarizzazione del lavoro. Polarizzazione e immigrazione. Modifiche nelle professioni. Sviluppi futuri dell'apprendimento automatico. Sviluppo tecnologico, produttività, occupazione e valore aggiunto del lavoro.

For individuals who are food insecure, food pantries can be a vital resource to improve access to adequate food. Access to adequate food may be conceptualized within five dimensions: availability (item variety), accessibility (e.g., hours of operation), accommodation (e.g., cultural sensitivity), affordability (costs, monetary or otherwise), and acceptability (e.g., as related to quality). This study examined the five dimensions of access in a convenience sample of 50 food pantries in the Bronx, NY. The design was cross-sectional. Qualitative data included researcher observations and field notes from unstructured interviews with pantry workers. Quantitative data included frequencies for aspects of food access, organized by the five access dimensions. Inductive analysis of quantitative and qualitative data revealed three main inter-related findings: (1) Pantries were not reliably open: only 50% of pantries were open during hours listed in an online directory (several had had prolonged or indefinite closures); (2) Even when pantries were open, all five access dimensions showed deficiencies (e.g., limited inventory, few hours, pre-selected handouts without consideration of preferences, opportunity costs, and inferior-quality items); (3) Open pantries frequently had insufficient food supply to meet client demand. To deal with mismatch between supply and demand, pantries developed rules for food provision. Rules could break down in cases of pantries receiving food deliveries, leading to workarounds, and in cases of compelling client need, leading to exceptions. Adherence to rules, versus implementation of workarounds and/or exceptions, was worker- and situation-dependent and, thus, unpredictable. Overall, pantry food provision was unreliable. Future research should explore clients’ perception of pantry access considering multiple access dimensions. Future research should also investigate drivers of mismatched supply and demand to create more predictable, reliable, and adequate food provision.

The literature on spatial mismatch often focuses on a mismatch within cities or local labour markets. This paper looks at the spatial mismatch between local labour markets. Using US data, we study the evolution of inter-regional mismatch between 1980 and 2010 and how this evolution varies across skill levels. Since we expect the spatial structure of supply and demand in the labour market to play a central role at this geographical level, we develop an extension of the spatial mismatch index, as the standard version does not take this spatial structure into account. Our results indicate that spatial mismatch has been increasing over the past decades, an increase that is largely attributable to spatial structure effects. The inter-regional spatial mismatch mainly affects low-skilled jobs and workers: our findings suggest that the degree of the spatial mismatch for low-skilled, relative to high-skilled workers, increased from a ratio of two in 1980 to almost four in 2010.

This paper provides new estimates of local job multipliers, the ratio of total jobs generated to some initial number of jobs created from a demand shock. Multipliers greatly affect benefits versus costs of local job-creation policies. These new estimates rely on improved methodology and data. The methodology better captures dynamic effects of demand shocks, specifies the model so that demand shocks are more comparable, and is more general in the types of demand shocks that are considered. The data has more industry detail than that used in previous studies. The local job multipliers estimated tend to be about one-quarter lower than typically estimated local multipliers, closer to 1.5 than to 2.0. In addition, demand shocks to all industries matter, not just to tradable industries. Multipliers are similar across different types of geographic areas, with county multipliers being only one-quarter below commuting zone multipliers and state multipliers only one-quarter above commuting zone multipliers. Multipliers are not larger for larger commuting zones, but they increase in commuting zones that have lower initial employment to population ratios. Multipliers are higher for high-tech industries, particularly in commuting zones with a larger initial high-tech share. In such high-tech local economies, high-tech multipliers may be close to 3. While our high-tech multipliers are greater than for other industries, our estimated high-tech multipliers are less than in some prior studies.

A multiple causes perspective contends that economic development and poor health contributed to early 20th-century southern race-related differences in fertility. The authors link the 1910 IPUMS to the 1916 Plantation Census (1909 data), southern disease (malaria and hookworm), and sanitation indicators to examine fertility differentials, while accounting for child mortality (an endogenous demographic control). They find that African-American and white women in counties with higher malaria mortality had higher child mortality. Additionally, African-American women exposed to poorer sanitation and plantation development had higher child mortality. Consistent with a multiple causes perspective, white women’s fertility was lower where land improvement and school enrollment were higher. African-American women’s fertility was lower in health-place contexts of higher malaria mortality and greater plantation development.

Over the past half century aging in the United States has been transformed, given improvements in life expectancy, educational attainment, and population health coupled with the unraveling of conventional retirement exits and protections. Yet we know very little about how the day-to-day experiences of older men and women have changed—or remained stable—during this period. Using time diary data from the American Heritage Time Use Study from 1965–2012, we examine trends in older Americans’ time use in the United States in tandem with major shifts in later adult demography, workforce/retirement timing, and risk. We focus specifically on older (ages 50-79) women’s and men’s participation in paid work, leisure, exercise, eating, unpaid work, and sleep, theorizing within-gender historical changes as well as growing cross-gender convergence over time. We use decomposition analyses to consider whether patterns we observe are the result of changes in behavior or changing population composition.

Our findings suggest that when it comes to reducing child poverty, a program without parental work requirements has the potential for the largest impact. However, policymakers may have other objectives in mind when considering expansions to public child care and preschool. For example, if reducing disparities in early learning is a primary goal, a universal program without income requirements might be more promising. As policymakers consider expanding access to early care and education, clarifying their goals is a necessary first step in weighing the trade-offs between different kinds of expansions and determining the best path forward to improve families’ economic well-being and promote the future success of California’s children.

We use the 100% samples of the 1940, 1930, and 1920 Censuses to see how the unem- ployed in 1940 compared to other workers before the Depression, particularly the long-term unemployed. We also examined how emergency workers on programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) fared as former members of the unemployed. We match workers across Census waves and distinguish them along several dimensions, including age, race, skill, re- gion, occupation, industry, migration status, and local economic conditions. These matched records will allow us to see how much unemployment outcomes were determined by worker productivity versus having the bad luck in not having work during the Depression.

This paper studies the interaction of labor-market frictions and endogenous production-network formation in firms’ decisions on employment, sourcing and production, within the context of trade policy. I construct a quantitative general-equilibrium model featuring worker-firm and firm-to-firm matching in the production process. I calibrate the model and investigate how trade policy and labor-market efficiency affect production-network density, trade flows, unemployment and wage inequality. The model shows a 1.5% decrease in relative labor-market frictions in one country can lead to a 0.1% decrease in the partner country’s relative number of downstream production-network linkages. I explore how heterogeneity in firm-to-firm matching costs determines the effect of a trade shock on wage inequality. I show that a protectionist tariff by one country leads to increases in domestic long-run unemployment and real wages. Examining these channels separately leads to sizable quantitative and qualitative changes in the predicted outcomes of trade policy

This paper examines the determinants of the wage penalty experienced by undocumented workers, defined as the wage gap between observationally equivalent legal and undocumented immigrants. Using recently developed methods that impute undocumented status for foreign-born persons sampled in microdata surveys, the study documents a number of empirical findings. Although the unadjusted gap in the log hourly wage between the average undocumented and legal immigrant is very large (over 35 percent), almost all of this gap disappears once the calculation adjusts for differences in observable socioeconomic characteristics. The wage penalty to undocumented immigration for men was only about 4 percent in 2016. Nevertheless, there is sizable variation in the wage penalty over the life cycle, across demographic groups, across different legal environments, and across labor markets. The flat age-earnings profiles of undocumented immigrants, created partly by slower occupational mobility, implies a sizable increase in the wage penalty over the life cycle; the wage penalty falls when legal restrictions on the employment of undocumented immigrants are relaxed (as with DACA) and rises when restrictions are tightened (as with E-Verify); and the wage penalty responds to increases in the number of undocumented workers in the labor market, with the wage penalty being higher in those states with larger undocumented populations.

In the United States, half of college enrollees drop out before earning a bachelor’s degree. This paper examines the effect of a college subsidy scheme, in which the subsidy amount varies across years in college, on college dropout and wage inequality. I find that by increasing college subsidies from freshmen to seniors, the number of college graduates increases. In addition, the skill premium decreases more than the case in which the total budget for current constant subsidies is increased by 50%. The scheme is welfare improving, despite the fact that enrollment decreases.

I study the selection and economic outcomes of Italians in Argentina and the US, the two largest destinations during the age of mass migration. Prior cross-sectional work finds that Italians had faster assimilation in Argentina, but it is inconclusive on whether this was due to differences in selection or host-country conditions. I assemble data following Italians from passenger lists to censuses, enabling me to compare migrants with similar pre-migration characteristics. Italians had better economic outcomes in Argentina, and this advantage was unlikely to be due to selection. Migration path dependence can rationalize these differences in an era of open borders.

This chapter describes the gains in health in the twentieth century and the development of the markets of health care and health insurance. It first provides an overview of the literature documenting the gains in public health that led to mortality transition in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clean water, sanitation and electrification helped reduce mortality, as did food and milk inspection, the elimination of parasites such as malaria and hookworm, and food fortification. As the century progressed, advances in science and technology, combined with reforms in physician education and licensing led to improvements in medical care and health. These changes increased the cost of medical care and led to the development of health insurance markets.

This paper examines how the price of home heating affects mortality in the US. Exposure to cold is one reason that mortality peaks in winter, and a higher heating price increases exposure to cold by reducing heating use. It also raises energy bills, which could affect health by decreasing other health-promoting spending. Our empirical approach combines spatial variation in the energy source used for home heating and temporal variation in the national prices of natural gas versus electricity. We find that a lower heating price reduces winter mortality, driven mostly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes.

In this paper, I examine the impact of universal preschool programs on male labor supply. By lowering the cost of child care, universal preschool programs could affect fathers’ decisions of how much to work. While an extensive literature studies the effects of policies that lower the cost of child care on female labor supply, those policies’ effects on male labor supply have barely been explored. I use data from six states that implemented universal preschool programs between 1995 and 2006, as well as data from 12 states that do not provide any funding for preschool. I use a variation of a difference-in-differences regression model to determine universal preschool’s impact on male labor supply. For men whose youngest child is four, I find that universal preschool programs increase the probability of labor force participation by 1.3 percentage points and increase the probability of employment by 1.26 percentage points. Dividing the sample by marital status, I find that married fathers of four-year-olds are more likely to be in the labor force and employed when universal preschool is introduced, but I do not find a change in the labor supply of single fathers of four-year-olds.

Using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and survey questions from ATUS’s Wellbeing Module (waves 2010, 2012, 2013), we examine if, and how, the sex of a child influence’s mother’s and father’s emotional states (feelings of happiness, stress, etc.) during childcare activities. We also examine whether parent’s emotional states during time spent with either boys or girls are associated with greater or lesser amount of time that mothers and fathers devote to a particular child’s sex. Given persistent gaps in childcare time between mothers and fathers particularly for daughters, we are especially interested in whether men who report more favorable emotions during time spent with daughters report a greater amount of time spent with them. Lastly, we assess whether the association between the sex of a child and parent’s emotional states during childcare activities varies across the age of the child, revealing unique well-being patterns for different child-stages.