The news that Hispanics have become the nation's largest minority was no demographic surprise. Its fruition had been predicted at least 30 years ago. This news event, though, was important because the appearance of Latinos on the American scene could no longer be deniedneither in the nation's vital economic or educational policies nor in politics. Nowhere. Once considered a sleeping giant, the Latino population has not only grown tremendously but also now constitutes a significant presence throughout most of the United States. Once confined to a small number of states, the Latino population has migrated to new regions, including much of the South, moved into new sectors of the economy, and become an important voting bloc in many states. Its impact is heightened by the fact that it is considerably younger than an aging non-Latino America, making its potential impact on America's future all the greater.This chapter reports on the factors that account for this growth. Overall, it describes how relatively high rates of immigration and fertility have shaped the growth and the creation of an especially youthful age structure among the Latino population. In particular, it examines how changing immigration policies, social networks, and other factors have led to immigration from Latin America and then how a changing labor market as well as immigration policies have affected migration patterns in the United States and prompted the regional dispersion of Latinos. These demographic foundations are fundamental for understanding nearly every aspect of Latino well-being covered in this book, including their spatial distribution and family structure, their position in the educational system and the labor market, and their access to health care and the political system. A notable example of the importance of this population was its role in the recent presidential election: the Hispanic vote may have influenced the outcome (Cobble and Velaquez, 2004). Given the demographic destiny of the Latino population, that influence is likely to grow with its dispersion into new states and as immigrants become citizens and their children reach voting age.

Minority-owned banks have a mission to promote economic well-being in their communities. In particular, specialization in lending based on a central mechanism of shared-minority identity can yield an advantage in serving community needs through times of financial and economic crises. To test this proposition, we analyze individual banks in their local market context from 2006 to 2020. Results suggest minority-owned banks improve economic resilience in their communities during the global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 crisis through increased small business and household lending, but fewer benefits are found during other phases of the business cycle. Our results are robust and stand up to treatments of identification concerns, including propensity score matching (PSM) and instrumental variables (IV). Our results imply that if all U.S. banks behaved in a manner consistent with minority-owned banks through the GFC, at least 1.9 million more minority jobs would have been maintained and at least $50 billion more in credit would have been available to small businesses on an annual basis. These findings are consistent with predictions of the economic resilience literature but not those of the finance-growth nexus literature.

There is widespread concern that the United States faces a problem in maintaining its position as the scientific and technological leader in the world and that loss of leadership threatens future economic well-being and national security. Business, science, and education groups have issued reports that highlight the value to the country of leadership in science and technology. Many call for new policies to increase the supply of scientific and engineering talent in the United States. While the reports differ in emphasis, the basic message is uniform: the United States should spend more on research and development (R&D) and increase the number of young Americans choosing scientific and technological careers. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush announced the American Competitiveness Initiative that concurred with these assessments: "For the U.S. to maintain its global economic leadership, we must ensure a continuous supply of highly trained mathematicians, scientists, engineers, technicians, and scientific support staff." In 1957, faced with the analogous challenge of Sputnik, the United States responded with increased R&D spending and by awarding large numbers of National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research and National Defense Education Act fellowships, which together induced a large number of young Americans to invest in science and engineering careers. In the early 1960s, the country gave about one thousand NSF graduate research fellowships per year. Forty-five years later, despite a more-than-threefold increase in the number of college students graduating in science and engineering and a global challenge from the spread of technology and higher education to the rest of the world, the United States still gives the same number of NSF fellowships. With so many more college students, current U.S. NSF fellowship policy gives less of an incentive for students to enter science and engineering than did policies in the earlier period.

People flows refers to the movement of people across international borders in the form of immigration, international student flows, business travel, and tourism. Despite its peripheral status in debates over globalization, the movement of people from low income to high income countries is fundamental in global economic development, with consequences for factor endowments, trade patterns, and transfer of technology. In part because people flows are smaller than trade and capital flows, the dispersion of pay for similarly skilled workers around the world exceeds the dispersion of the prices of goods and cost of capital. This suggests that policies that give workers in developing countries greater access to advanced country labor markets could raise global economic well-being considerably. The economic problem is that immigrants rather than citizens of immigrant-receiving countries benefit most from immigration. The paper considers "radically economic policies" such as auctioning immigration visas or charging sizeable fees and spending the funds on current residents to increase the economic incentive for advanced countries to accept greater immigration.

The food stamp program, serving 24 million persons in 2004 at a cost of $27 billion, is one of themost important income support programs in the United States. Despite this prominence, it hasbeen relatively understudied as it has been difficult for researchers to isolate the causal impact ofthe Food Stamp Program on food spending, nutritional intake, labor supply and other outcomes.Because the program is national, there is not variation in program parameters (such as starkdifferences in state benefit levels or eligibility) that are typically exploited by researchers tomeasure program impacts. In this work, we leverage previously underutilized variation acrosscounties in the date they originally implemented their Food Stamp Program in the 1960s andearly 1970s. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the 1960, 1970 and 1980Decennial Census, we employ difference-in-difference methods to estimate the impact ofprogram availability on food spending, family income, labor supply, and health. Using thePSID, we find that that the introduction of food stamps leads to decreases in out of pocket foodexpenses, decreases in the propensity to eat out, and overall increases in food consumption. Theresults are consistent with theoretical predictions but are not precisely estimated. Results fromthe Census and PSID show no evidence of a significant work disincentive from introduction offood stamps.

This reports analysis is centered on the economic and political reforms of the 1990s. If most of these reforms did not directly address gender equality, they nevertheless received considerable scrutiny from a gender perspective. And whatever their intentions, they had significant and mixed implications for gender relations and womens well-being. As its title alludes, achieving gender equality and gender justice will be very difficult in a world that is increasingly unequal. The report presents strong arguments for why gender equality must be placed at the core of efforts to reorient the development agenda.

Do variations in the duration of grandparents caring for grandchildren result in significantly different patterns of poverty and receipt of public assistance for the household and disability for the grandparent caregiver? Using data from the 5% Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS) from the Census 2000, this paper explores how grandparent caregivers and their households fare as the length of caregiving extends from the possibly temporary category of under 6 months to a more permanent situation of over five years. The results indicate that households in the higher duration of grandparent caregiving categories have a significantly lower likelihood of living below 150% of the poverty threshold and a higher likelihood of receiving public assistance, after controlling for demographic and human capital covariates[JI1]. Disability of the caregiver varies slightly as the length of caregiving reaches five or more years.

This report is the product of a 2-year study by a panel of experts convened by the National Academies and supported by several foundations and U.S. government agencies. This panel was charged with conducting a study of the significant demographic changes taking place among the U.S. Hispanic population and their progress relative to the mainstream in several key areas. The panel could also consider ways to improve related data collection. The main purpose of the report is to help inform future policy debate and provide government, public institutions, and the private sector with the information needed to allocate resources for the enduring benefit of both the Hispanic population and the nation as a whole.In the edited volume Hispanics and the Future of America that serves as the companion to this report, readers will find a more detailed review of Hispanics' history, demography, geography, education, family, employment, economic well-being, health, and political engagement.

This study brings to light the phenomenon of aging in the West Indian migrant community in the United States. It presents the results of a cross-sectional exploratory survey of 107 community-dwelling West Indian women aged 55 years and over living in the Greater Hartford region of Connecticut. The data analysis reveals positive self-reports of health and few limiting or disabling conditions. However, there is substantial income inequality, a negative relationship between age group and income and limited use of services among those women most likely to require them. The findings suggest that some of the qualities which contributed to West Indians becoming the Black success model in the U.S. may be counterproductive for successful aging. A community-based strategy for addressing these issues is outlined. (Copies of this article are available from: Haworth Document Delivery Centre, Haworth Press Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580).

This paper examines the economic well-being of households headed by same-sex partners relative to households headed by married and cohabiting heterosexuals. Using data from the 1990 Census of Population and Households, Public Use Micro Data 5% Sample (PUMS), we evaluate inter-group differences in absolute and adjusted household income and, using algebraic and regression-based decomposition techniques, assess the contribution to these differences of household human capital and labor market activity. Descriptive analyses reveal that average annual income and the income-to-needs ratio are higher in same-sex households than in households headed by married or cohabiting heterosexuals. The multivariate decompositions indicate that this economic advantage exists even though lesbian and gay male couples reap lower returns to their combined human capital investments and labor market activity.

This thesis examines the well-being of families under changing labor market conditions, changes in the legal environment and changes in public policy. The first chapter asks how women's fertility decisions are affected by changing labor market conditions. Chapter two examines whether divorce shocks persist into old age, and the final chapter studies how the elderly alter their living arrangements in response to changes in Social Security benefit payments. Chapter one exploits exogenous variation in labor demand for women to measure how total fertility responds to changes in female earnings. The principal finding is that women who are likely to face lower wage offers - those who have completed high school or are high school dropouts - reduce their total fertility when labor market conditions are better. In contrast, women who are likely to face higher wage offers - those who have completed at least some college - increase their total fertility when labor market conditions improve. Chapter two exploits variation in property division laws to examine whether there is a persistent effect of such laws on the well-being of ever-divorced women in retirement. The results suggest that a woman who divorces in a state and year where all pension assets are recognized as marital property has higher per capita household income in retirement than a woman who divorced in a state where pensions were not considered marital property.The results are consistent with some persistence in the effect of property division laws at divorce, but the effects do not appear to be pervasive enough to have a significant impact on other measures of well-being in retirement, including whether a woman lives independently, whether she or a member of her household owns her home, whether she receives government assistance, and whether she receives pension income. Chapter three examines how elderly individuals change their living arrangements when their social security benefits change. Findings suggest that living arrangements are substantially more elastically demanded by non-married elderly than previous studies, and that reductions in Social Security benefits would significantly alter the living arrangements of the elderly. Most of these effects appear to be concentrated among the less educated elderly.

This thesis investigates the effect of social benefits on the labor market behavior of immigrants and females. The first part analyses the effect of welfare generosity on the choice of residency of immigrants and natives. The second part investigates the extent to which social benefits affect the relative well-being of females with and without children in the context of four countries. The effect of welfare benefits on migration has long been discussed, but the research has not led to unequivocal conclusions. Similarly, without the support of a consensus in the literature, patterns in the concentration of immigrants across the United States have been suspected of reflecting welfare generosity. The goal of the first study is to reduce uncertainty regarding the extent of welfare induced migratory and clustering behavior of foreign-born individuals. The choice of residence of immigrants in relation to natives is investigated by relating those choices to the interstate dispersion of welfare benefits and other economic variables and their changing magnitudes over time. The reliability of common methodological approaches is also examined. The paper employs difference-in-difference comparison group-based methods with state fixed effects along with mixed multinomial and conditional logits. The empirical analysis indicates that immigrants cluster in high benefit regions, but their migration pattern is positively correlated with changes over time of economic variables other than welfare benefits. These results have been confirmed by more recent data of immigrant migration patterns. The findings of this paper suggest the existence of other factors aside from benefits (for example, wage rates and ethnic networks), which explain the residential choice of immigrants to a greater extent.The second study explores cross-country variation in social benefits and their effect on the size of the family gap the gap in the well-being of women with and without children as measured by income components. The analysis finds a lot of variation in the impact of benefits across countries and within the income distribution. In countries with means-tested benefits the effect of children on disposable income is not alleviated, but reduced, while countries with universal benefits do not exhibit any effect of children at the bottom of the distribution.

The author examines available evidence on the effects of exposure to joblessness on emotional well-being according to race and sex. The impact of racism on general health outcomes also is considered, particularly racism in the specific form of wage discrimination. Perceptions of racism and measured exposures to racism may be distinct triggers for adverse health outcomes. Whether the effects of racism are best evaluated on the basis of self-classification or social classification of racial identity is unclear. Some research sorts between the effects of race and socioeconomic status on health. The development of a new longitudinal database will facilitate more accurate identification of connections between racism and negative health effects.

The first section begins the examination by illustrating the demographic shifts most commonly associated with gentrification, and then offers two competing explanations for them. The competing explanations motivate two very different views of the distributional effects of gentrification. In the first view, revitalization of urban neighborhoods causes changes in well-being among disadvantaged households. In the second view, gentrification is merely a side effect of other broad economic trends that affect the poor. The analysis also makes clear that residential displacementthe primary focus of most existing literature on the consequences of gentrificationis neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for declines in the living standards of poor households.The following section considers the general equilibrium effects of gentrification beyond the housing market. Increases in the local tax base might improve the quality of local public goods and services. Employment opportunities in certain industries might improve with the arrival of a more affluent clientele; that is to say, gentrification might partially solve the urban "spatial mismatch" problem. 7 Finally, gentrification might decrease the urban concentration of poverty, ameliorating the ills associated with it. 8 The subsequent section reviews the literature on the distributional impact of gentrification, and concludes that previous studies are too narrowly focused to fully address the question of whether gentrification harms the poor.

Americans have long been loath to describe themselves in terms of class. Compared to the British, for example, Americans are far less likely to say that their society is composed of haves and have nots.2 In many respects, American culture is notably egalitarian; for centuries, foreign visitors have remarked on how little deference common folk give to their social betters here. They also used to note the political equality among citizens in a former era when the United States was exceptionally democratic. But egalitarian style and universal rights coexist with profound differences in economic resources. Americans are and have always been divided economically. Indeed, America in 2000 was the most economically divided nation in the developed world it had the widest spread in wealth. These divisions not only challenge the self-image of Americans as egalitarian, they have further consequences. Research shows that nations and communities with relatively wide disparities in material standards of living tend also to have relatively high rates of social problems, civic alienation, and discontent. In this paper, we examine differences in Americans standards of living in 2000 and how differences evolved over the twentieth century, especially since World War II. We describe how Americans in 2000 were separated by their material circumstances and how those distinctions compare to ones earlier in the twentieth century, taking into account peoples annual incomes, financial assets, consumption, and subjective assessments of their wealth. For each of these dimensions, we first contrast the well-being of better-off to less well-off Americans. Second, we distinguish the living standards of people of different ages, ancestries, educational levels, and locations. Over most of the century, economic divisions among Americans narrowed considerably in both these ways affluent and indigent became less distinct, as did Americans of different regions and races. But that the convergence stalled and then reversed in roughly the last three decades, widening the economic differences among Americans, most notably dividing by levels of education.

In early 2002, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) will publish a special report on children. The report will present changes from 1990 to 2000 for the nation, 50 states, and the District of Columbia for several risk factors including child ren in poverty, children in working poor families, children living with a householder who is a high school dropout, and children without secure parental employment. The report will show 1990 census data and 2000 data from a special survey, the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey (C2SS).