Since 2008, net migration from Mexico to US has been stagnant or declining. However, there are some states where the number of Mexican foreign born continues to grow. As an example, between 2010 and 2016 California showed the largest decline in net Mexican migration while Texas showed the largest growth. Analysis of wage level differentials between states introduces an interesting paradox, as average wages in California are higher than in Texas. This clearly suggests that non-wage factors may explain the positive migration trend observed in Texas. Migration theory has established at least four determinants of net migration. First, foreign-born Mexicans may be more attracted to migrate to states in the U.S. with a higher wage level or economic growth than the national . . .

Demographics are not destiny, but steady and predictable changes to the electorate play an important role in defining the landscape of American politics. Most demographic groups have a political lean, so a group increasing or decreasing in size over time will tend to benefit one party or type of politics over another. The most well-known example is the growth of the nonwhite population in the United States, which—since nonwhites tend to lean heavily Democratic—is typically viewed as tilting the electoral terrain somewhat toward the Democrats over time as well as increasing the weight of nonwhite voters within the Democratic Party over time. But other changes are important, such as the decline of noncollege educated voters, particularly whites; the aging of the adult population; and the rise of new generations to replace older ones. In this report, we will explore the effect of these changes ...

This chartbook illustrates the characteristics of the county’s 65-plus population in 2015*, and changes that have occurred since 2000. It also includes population characteristics, such as education, income level, and marital status, that are shown to be associated with the need for long-term services and supports. There are charts that compare the older population of the county to the state as a whole, and charts that illustrate change over time within the county. The data presented in this chartbook are intended to assist planners, decisions makers, and service providers to understand the growth in numbers and proportion of older adults, particularly those who will likely need assistance. An online interactive data center is available for you to define your own topic, county, and population of interest to see current figures and change over time. Please visit www.ohio-population.org.

Fracking innovations revolutionized the United States oil and gas industry and facilitated a boom in energy production in states with oil and gas resources. This paper examines effects of oil and gas booms within a state on individual employment and earnings. To account for endogenous migration decisions, we instrument for oil and gas production in workers’ state of residence via the predicted percent of oil and gas employment in their state of birth. We find statistically significant and economically meaningful positive effects. The bulk of the effects accrue to workers employed outside the oil and gas industry indicating sizable spillovers.

How do workers initially match with firms, and how do these matches improve over time? A large job ladder literature devoted to this question proposes a hypothesis in which poached workers move to better firms while displaced workers move to worse firms. This paper shows that the job ladder in skilled professions is inverted, with downward-directed poaching and upward-directed displacement. I provide empirical evidence for this using a new historical dataset on lawyers. Guided by the evidence, I develop a model of dynamic labor market assignment that explains why the job ladder for lawyers is inverted, and is likely to be in most skilled professions. Each firm’s comparative advantage is to hire a worker whose location in the talent distribution matches its own location in the job ladder. Firms privately learn how talented their workers are and only allow below-average worker types (lemons) to be poached. Hence, poached workers move down the ladder to firms that are more specialized in lemons. Workers are revealed to have been under-placed when they are retained. Thus, by temporarily removing the lemons problem, random displacements help under-placed workers move up the ladder. I structurally estimate the model in order to quantify misallocation and appraise potential labor market reforms. I estimate that more than 20% of output is lost to misallocation induced by informational frictions. I find support for the use of academic competition as a means of generating stronger pre-job market signals of talent in order to reduce misallocation.

Liver allocation policies and strategic offer-acceptance decisions determine who ulti- mately receives liver transplants. For transplant candidates with greater medical need, the Share 35 policy provides priority for livers obtained from areas further away. This paper examines the policy effect on transplant outcomes and the decision to accept or decline a liver offer. First, I find that increasing access to liver transplants effectively reduces mortality risks before receiving transplants, which is the goal of the policy. Second, I find a mixed effect on the quality of transplanted livers for targeted candi- dates. Although livers travel further that implies lower liver quality, those candidates receive livers with better donor characteristics. This compensation on liver quality can be explained by the change in offer-acceptance incentives. Greater access to liver offers enables targeted candidates to be more selective of offered livers.

Children learn language first from their parents. If parents speak only English or only another language at home, the children will be monolingual, at least until they spend time with peers or in a school that exposes them to a second language. If parents speak two languages . . .

This paper empirically investigates the long-run effects of major health improvements on income growth in the United States. To isolate exogenous changes in health, the econometric model uses quasi-experimental variation in cardiovascular disease mortality across states over time. The results show that there is a causal link between health and income per person, and they provide novel evidence that health dynamics shape life-cycle incomes. Compared to previous generations, life-cycle income profiles slope more strongly at the beginning and at the end of work life, such that age becomes a more prominent determinant of income dynamics. The channels for this transformation include better health, higher educational attainment, and changing labor supply.

This research investigates the geographic aspects of health care delivery in the event of a sudden increase in the need for care. We constructed an integrated disease outbreak and surge capacity model to evaluate the ability of a region's healthcare system to provide care in the event of a pandemic. In a case study, we implement the model to investigate how an influenza pandemic similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic would affect the population of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan statistical area and the ability of the region's hospital system to respond to such an event. Under varying scenarios for hospital capacity, we found that the population needing care would overwhelm the system's ability to provide care in the case study. Our model is presented as a framework that can be augmented and expanded to suit the needs of the particular event and healthcare system or services required. By integrating concepts and models from epidemiology, geography, and health care services research, we provide a valuable tool for potential use in disaster planning, hospital system evaluation, and pandemic preparedness.

This study focused on college completion or higher among Asian American population and the effect of English proficiency and other Asian languages spoken at home. Whether speaking English “well” or “not well” influences individual’s educational attainment. Assimilation theory and social capital theory were utilized. Data utilized form IPUMS 2011, examine six Asian ethnic languages, English proficiency, education, employment status, multigenerational, family formation, income, age, and sex among Asian Americans. Findings show overall English proficiency are statistically significant at the .001 level that Asians who speak English only, “very-well, “well”, and “not well” are more likely to obtain a college degree. Future implications will examine ethnic behaviors and migration patterns on educational attainment

This chartbook illustrates the characteristics of the county’s 65-plus population in 2015*, and changes that have occurred since 2000. It also includes population characteristics, such as education, income level, and marital status, that are shown to be associated with the need for long-term services and supports. There are charts that compare the older population of the county to the state as a whole, and charts that illustrate change over time within the county. The data presented in this chartbook are intended to assist planners, decisions makers, and service providers to understand the growth in numbers and proportion of older adults, particularly those who will likely need assistance. An online interactive data center is available for you to define your own topic, county, and population of interest to see current figures and change over time. Please visit www.ohio-population.org.

This dissertation consists of three chapters, each of them containing an essay in applied microeconomic theory. The first chapter, "Career Concerns with Cost Uncertainty'', considers a continuous time career concerns model. As in Holmstrom (1999), there is symmetric uncertainty about a worker's ability. Also, the worker has private information about her conscientiousness (cost of effort). The sequence of observed outputs allows learning about both attributes of the worker. As in the career concerns literature, incentives to exert effort are driven in part by a signal-jamming motive, i.e., the desire to manipulate the market's beliefs about the worker's ability. In line with prior results, this motive is present throughout the worker's lifetime, but its impact on the worker's effort gradually decreases over time as the market learns the worker's ability. In contrast, the motive to signal conscientiousness is more nuanced and changes sign as time progresses. I find that early in her career, cost uncertainty pushes the agent to work harder to signal that she is conscientious. During her middle and late career, the agent has an incentive to signal that she is lazy. In the second phase of her career, the agent lowers her effort to seem lazy. During her late career, the agent, surprisingly, increases her effort in order to convince the market of her laziness. This result, in which the impact of cost uncertainty on effort choice changes sign twice is used to explain the patterns of residuals in the relation between earnings and work experience specified in Mincer (1974) and noted in Murphy & Welch (1990). The second chapter, "The Power of the Agenda Setter: A Dynamic Legislative Bargaining Game", is co-authored with Ewout Verriest. We seek to answer why some monarchies have transitioned toward democratic reform while others have sustained without much change. We consider a society with a monarch, a bourgeoisie, and a nobility. A transition toward democratization takes agenda-setting power away from the monarch and provides it to the bourgeoisie and nobility. We argue that such transitions could be the result of a rational farsighted monarch giving away power in order to prevent coalitional cooperation by the nobility and bourgeoisie. We consider an infinitely repeated legislative bargaining model in which three agents split a dollar in each period. The status quo evolves endogenously over time, as agents can approve new proposals by a majority of two votes. One agent, the monarch, has veto power and must approve any proposal that alters the status quo. Our key parameter of interest is the monarch's agenda-setting power, de ned as the probability that she is randomly selected as the proposer in a given period. We characterize a symmetric Markov Perfect Equilibrium for all possible primitives (i.e. the initial status quo, the discount factor, and agenda-setting power). We find that for any interior initial allocation, there exists a level of patience such that beyond a threshold agenda-setting power, the nobility and bourgeoisie have incentives to work together. They work against each other if the monarch has lower agenda-setting power. When the two non-veto players work together, they can sustain positive allocations asymptotically. If the monarch starts out with a high agenda-setting power, she would prefer to reduce her own power, thereby preempting any cooperation among the two non-veto players. We see this as voluntary democratization. We also find that if there is high inequality in the status quo, or if the monarch already has a high proportion of the total surplus in the status quo, then there is no need for the monarch to initiate democratization. The Markov perfect equilibrium that we find is unique after applying a coalitional stability refinement. We also confirm that the equilibrium structure is robust to having an arbitrary odd number of players. The third chapter, "Optimal Differentiation through Step-wise Learning", considers an environment with two players, an Incumbent and an Entrant vying to sell to a continuum of consumers distributed over an n-dimensional space. A location on the n-dimensional space denotes a particular realization of the vector of n attributes that define a product, the location of a consumer denotes her preference. In this model, learning precedes product design. In the learning stage, the entrant must optimally acquire information about consumer locations across the n dimensions. While the incumbent’s product is assumed to be fixed, the entrant is free to choose a product design. A valence advantage for the incumbent drives horizontal product differentiation. There are no prices in this model, which makes it more suited to markets where customers are not charged a price such as websites, mobile applications, or politics. An alternate interpretation is that this model speaks to the decisions faced by the product design vertical of a firm, and not sales. I find that the optimal product design chosen by the entrant is characterized by just-enough differentiation and selective differentiation. Crucially, I show that the returns to research are initially convex, and must be eventually concave. Therefore, step-wise specialization is optimal in this environment.

Direct cash transfer programs have shown success as poverty interventions in both the developing and developed world, yet little research exists examining the society-wide outcomes of an unconditional cash transfer program disbursed without means-testing. This paper attempts to determine the impact of direct cash transfers on educational outcomes in a developed society by investigating the impacts of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which was launched in 1982 and continues to be disbursed on an annual basis to every Alaskan. A synthetic control model is deployed to examine the path of educational attainment among Alaskans between 1977 and 1991 in order to determine if high school status completion rates after the launch of the dividend diverge from the synthetic in a manner suggestive of a treatment effect.

This study attempts to model smoking behavior in the United States using Current Population Survey data from 2010 and 2011. An array of demographic and socioeconomic variables is used in an effort to explain smoking behavior from roughly 139,000 individuals. Two regression techniques are employed to analyze the data. These methods found that individuals with children are more likely to smoke than individuals without children; females are less likely to smoke than males; Hispanics, blacks, and Asians are all less likely to smoke than whites; divorcees and widows are more likely to smoke than single individuals; married individuals are less likely to smoke than singles; retired individuals are less likely to smoke than working ones; unemployed individuals are more likely to smoke than working ones; and as education level increases after high school graduation, smoking rates decrease. Finally, it is recommended that encouraging American children to pursue higher education may be the most effective way to minimize cigarette smoking.

This chartbook illustrates the characteristics of the county’s 65-plus population in 2015*, and changes that have occurred since 2000. It also includes population characteristics, such as education, income level, and marital status, that are shown to be associated with the need for long-term services and supports. There are charts that compare the older population of the county to the state as a whole, and charts that illustrate change over time within the county. The data presented in this chartbook are intended to assist planners, decisions makers, and service providers to understand the growth in numbers and proportion of older adults, particularly those who will likely need assistance. An online interactive data center is available for you to define your own topic, county, and population of interest to see current figures and change over time. Please visit www.ohio-population.org.

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of a U.S. paid maternity leave policy on the long-run outcomes of children. I exploit variation in access to paid leave that was created by long-standing state differences in short-term disability insurance coverage and the staggered enactment of laws that banned discrimination against pregnant workers in the 1960s and 1970s. While the availability of these benefits sparked a substantial expansion of leave-taking by new mothers, it also came with a cost. I find the enactment of paid leave led to shifts in labor supply and demand that decreased wages and family income among women of child-bearing age. In addition, the first generation of children born to mothers with access to maternity leave benefits were 1.9 percent less likely to attend college and 3.1 percent less likely to earn a four-year college degree.

Researchers attempting to identify and track health disparities and inequities generally use five racial or ethnic (R/E) categories-four racial groups (white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian) and one ethnic group (Hispanic)-to analyze and predict variations in health outcomes in the overall U.S. population. These categories are used as if they were permanent, naturally occurring, internally homogeneous, and discrete. However, the United States is becoming increasingly racially ambiguous because of (1) the growth of the Latino population, nearly half of whom do not identify with one of the four racial groups; and (2) the growing population of racially ambiguous babies, whose mothers and fathers are of different R/E groups. In California, an average annual 52.6% of the babies born between 2011 and 2015 were racially ambiguous (i.e., their parents were from different R/E groups or at least one parent was something other than a single race).We describe the social-legal construction of hard-edged, binary racial categories in the United States from 1790 to the present (and the subsequent racial structuring of U.S. society along those categories). Researchers should shift the conceptualization of race from that of an innate, individual trait to that of a narrative, and should consider the impact that racial narratives can have on the life courses of individuals categorized as nonwhite. In light of the increasing racial ambiguity in the United States, the Latino fuzzy-edged, multivalent racial narrative that embraces racial mixing may be one alternative to the United States' hard-edged, binary one.

Using US data data spanning the period between 1970 and 2017, we analyze the economic assimilation of subsequent arrival cohorts of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the more economically disadvantaged group of immigrants. We compare the wage and employment gap and growth relative to similar natives across various cohorts of entry. We find that all cohorts started with a significant earning disadvantage relative to the average US native and eliminated 1/3 of it mainly in the 10-20 years after entry. We also find that when comparing them with similarly educated natives, the gap is much smaller and that recent cohorts, arriving after 1995, did not do worse, but better, than earlier cohorts. We also find that Mexicans and Central Americans in the construction sector and in urban areas did better in terms of gap and convergence than others. Finally, also for other immigrant groups, such as Chinese and Indians, recent cohorts did well relative to previous ones.

Michelle Obama said this during a graduation speech for Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Magnet High School in Nashville, Tennessee (Saenz, 2013). Obama used sev,eral examples of people, including her husband President B,arack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, to illustrate that triumph is a natural byproduct of adversity. Many Black students persist in an environment that often feels unwelcoming. Studies show that Black students are more likely to attend schools in a high secwity environment and less likely to perceive care and respect from their te.achers (Toldson, 2008). In addition, most Black high school graduates have had to adapt to a racially biased curriculum that undermines their culture contribution to any field. Within this context, educators have a unique opportunity to impart wisdom and inspire posts,econdary success among Black students, by reaffirming Black culture and helping Black students create a personal narrative of success. Unfortunately, many educators and advocates use BS to denigrate and dispirit Black students through a mind-numbing recital of poorly sourced statistics, which imply that, for example, Black students hav,e a better chance of going to prison than to college and have a corrupt value system that attributes being smart to "acting White." These typ,es of condemnations elicit a variety of emotions from students, ranging from boredom to unease...

This article analyzes new methods and approaches used in the literature on economic history at the present stage. Introduction of digital technologies in the economic history in the second decade of the 21st century, faces new challenges and new opportunities. Reducing the cost of digitizing information, leading to the accumulation of huge amounts of digitized data, leads to the emergence of new research methods and a number of specialists are already talking about a new methodological revolution. The authors show that in recent decades, as more and more historical texts such as periodicals, letters, diaries, personal archives, books, etc. are digitized, new methods for analyzing the data are emerging. The article describes some of the most interesting historical information resources that form the basis for numerous projects in the field of economic history, both at the macro and micro levels. In these projects data on prices and incomes from all over the world are investigated, including data for real and nominal GDP, wages, price indices, Dow Jones fluctuations since 1885, interest rates and exchange rates, and much more. The article shows how modern research uses mathematical, economic and digital methods that allow, firstly, to clarify existing theories, analyze much larger amounts of data and, in addition, contribute to the creation of new theoretical concepts.