The historical demographic transition is one of the most important events in history. This study provides new evidence highlighting the key role that censorship and the release of family planning information played in this event. We begin by providing evidence linking the sharp decline in fertility in Britain starting in 1877 to the public release of family planning information that resulted from the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial. We then provide evidence that the trial had nearly simultaneous effects among British-origin populations abroad, particularly in Canada. These findings highlight the importance of information and changing social norms played in the historical demographic transition, as well as the role that cultural and linguistic ties played in transmitting this information around the world.

Concerns about the institutional impact of immigration, particularly in the United States, are not new. We can trace them back to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. More recently, in response to a literature that questions the desirability of current immigration restrictions, Borjas (J Econ Lit 53:961–974, 2015) speculates that immigrants coming from countries with poor institutions could reduce substantially the institutional quality in the United States to a point where it could negate all economic gains associated with immigration in terms of GDP and income. Using the Economic Freedom of North America index since 1980, we find no evidence to corroborate Borjas’s concerns. However, we find mixed evidence that immigration increases minimum wages and union density.

The United States imports intermediate inputs from China, helping downstream US firms to expand employment. Using a cross-regional reduced-form specification but differing from the existing literature, this paper (a) incorporates a supply chain perspective, (b) uses intermediate input imports rather than total imports in computing the downstream exposure, and (c) uses exporter-specific information to allocate imported inputs across US sectors. We find robust evidence that the total impact of trading with China is a positive boost to local employment and real wages. The most important factor is employment stimulation outside the manufacturing sector through the downstream channel. This overturns the received wisdom from the reduced-form literature and provides statistical support for a key mechanism hypothesized in general equilibrium spatial models.

Climate change is challenging rural livelihoods across the globe and migration is one potential adaptation strategy. However, migration is a difficult endeavor that requires substantial social and financial resources. This suggests that the use of migration as adaptation to climate change is likely a stratified process. In this way, climate change has the potential to reinforce existing inequalities and trap resource poor households in place. Mexico provides the ideal case study to investigate the intersection of climate, migration, and inequality given the strong history of international migration, vulnerability to climate impacts, and high levels of income inequality. Using multilevel discrete-time event-history methods, this study examines the association between climate strain and international migration across rural contexts characterized by low, average, and high socioeconomic marginalization between 1986-2013. This period encompasses the height and decline of Mexico-US migration, as well as large changes to the Mexican economy and agricultural sector which negatively impacted many rural households. Results suggest that precipitation deficits in prior corn growing seasons increase the likelihood of migration from households in average socioeconomic settings, while hot spells increase the probability of migration from households in highly marginalized contexts. Households that sent migrants were more likely to report agricultural employment compared to non-migrants in both settings. Finally, migrant households in the average marginalization group were more likely to own property, while social capital was predictive of migration in high marginalization contexts as migrant households were more likely to have familial ties to US migrants.

The US and Europe have both seen wage polarisation in the last three decades, in parallel with increasing technical automation. This column analyses the impact of immigration on this wage divergence via its effect on the labour supply side. It finds that immigration partially reverses natives’ polarisation of employment opportunities and wages by expanding aggregate demand and allowing natives to move to better paying occupations. Policies to reduce low-skilled migration with the aim of favouring native middle-class labour market opportunities may in fact do the opposite.

This article creates a new database that covers all U.S. banks in the census years between 1870 and 1900 to test the interaction between inequality and financial development when the banking system was starting over from scratch. A fixed-effects panel regression shows that the number of banks per thousand people in the South has a strong positive relationship with the size of farm operations. This suggests that large southern farm operators welcomed new banks after the Civil War. When the analysis is extended into the 1900s, the relationship becomes more negative, as bankers may have tried to block entrants.

In this article, we show how to use administrative data from the Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) identification card program to measure the joint distribution of sending and receiving locations for migrants from Mexico to the United States. Whereas other data sources cover only a small fraction of source or destination locations or include only very coarse geographic information, the MCAS data provide complete geographic coverage of both countries, detailed information on migrants’ sources and destinations, and a very large sample size. We first confirm the quality and representativeness of the MCAS data by comparing them with well-known household surveys in Mexico and the United States, finding strong agreement on the migrant location distributions available across data sets. We then document substantial differences in the mix of destinations for migrants from different places within the same source state, demonstrating the importance of detailed substate geographical information. We conclude with an example of how these detailed data can be used to study the effects of destination-specific conditions on migration patterns. We find that an Arizona law reducing employment opportunities for unauthorized migrants decreased emigration from and increased return migration to Mexican source regions with strong initial ties to Arizona.

The designation of landscape-scale national monuments has generated intense debate as to whether their regional economic effects are positive or negative. National monuments can restrict land uses, thus favoring economic development based on the low-wage tourism industry relative to higher-wage extractive industries. Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument has been managed for landscape-scale conservation while protecting existing valid uses. We assess postdesignation trends in the ranching, mining, and tourism industries, after which pre- and postdesignation paths of per capita income are examined using difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods. We conclude that monument designation had no effect on regional per capita income.

We study how reported sexism in the population affects American women. Fixed-effects and TSLS estimates show that higher prevailing sexism where she was born (background sexism) and where she currently lives (residential sexism) both lower a woman's wages, labor force participation and ages of marriage and childbearing. We argue that background sexism affects outcomes through the influence of previously-internalized norms, and that estimated associations regarding specific percentiles and male versus female sexism suggest that residential sexism affects labor market outcomes through prejudice-based discrimination by men, and non-labor market outcomes through the influence of current norms of other women. * We thank seminar participants at the NBER, ASSA Meetings,

We argue that transitional dynamics play a critical role in the evaluation of punitive incarceration reform on crime, inequality and the macroeconomy. Individuals’ past choices related to crime and employment under old policies have persistent consequences that limit their future responses to policy changes. Novel cohort evidence is provided in support of this mechanism. A quantitative model of this theory calibrated using restricted administrative data predicts nuanced, non-monotone dynamics of crime and incarceration similar to the U.S. experience following a single permanent increase in punitive incarceration in the 1980s. Increased inequality and declining employment accompany these changes and are borne unequally across generations.

The experiences of both families and aging are changing in today’s society. Many of us are staying healthier and living longer. Because an unprecedented number of Americans will be over age 65 in the twenty-first century, the aging experience will be felt by many and permeate our family life and society. Patricia Drentea’s Families and Aging examines how the changing lifestyles of Americans will play into aging well. It explores the life course transitions that occur as individuals and families age within the current U.S. context. The text is written from a sociological perspective, but it is interdisciplinary and can be used by many fields such as gerontology, social work, human development, and family studies.

The odds of experiencing a mass shooting in first person are low, approximately 411 people have died in such tragic events during the past decade in the United States. However, the high saliency of mass shooting events might induce changes in behavior that may pose an external cost on society. In this paper, I estimate the impact of indirect exposure to mass shootings on behavior using information on 45 mass shootings from 2003 to 2016. Using individual-level data, I find that being within 500 miles shortly after a mass shooting, individuals overall activity levels decrease by 1.3 percent. This decline is equivalent to a 10 or 3.7 minute decrease in walking or running, respectively. For an average weight person, this decline would mean 34.5 less calories burned per day. The decreases in activity are highest for women, individuals with some college and younger individuals. In addition to activity levels, I find an increase in the probability of having 14 or more days where perceived mental health is not good. Finally, I find a statistically significant decrease in hours worked of 0.5 percent or 10.7 minutes a week. This decrease is highest for women. These results show that aside from direct victims, mass shootings also impact the short-term behavior of a broader portion of the population. JEL Classification: D03, D81, I12 seminar participants at Tulane University for valuable feedback. Any errors are my own.

It is well known that female age at first marriage positively correlates with male income inequality. The common interpretation of this fact is that marital search takes longer when the pool of potential mates is more unequal. This paper challenges that interpretation with a novel econometric method. I utilize the fact that the female age at first marriage was shown to be a sum of a skewed term, possibly related to search, and a normally distributed residual. I estimate search duration as the expected skewed term. I find that in the American data this term does not positively correlate with male income inequality and female education.

Denne afhandling handler om, hvordan økonomisk ulighed går i arv fra forælder til barn. Man kan ikke bebrejde et barn for sit valg af skole, materielt afsavn eller sin adgang til rollemodeller. Ethvert samfund må derfor interessere sig for, hvordan social position overføres fra generation til generation. Hvordan sker dette i praksis, er det fair og i modsat fald hvad kan gøres for at ændre det? Det er de spørgsmål, læseren bør have på sinde. Afhandlingen består af to dele med fire artikler i alt. Fra forskellige vinkler omhandler alle artiklerne spørgsmål om lighed i muligheder og social arv. Først en enkelt artikel om målingen af social mobilitet, derefter tre kapitler, der beskriver, hvordan grundskolens indretning og opdeling af boligområder påvirker samfundets muligheder for at skabe lighed i adgangen til uddannelse og dermed lighed i muligheder.

Yvonne Jimenez Smith and her husband, Brandon Smith, spoke in whispers recently as they visited a white stucco house they planned to buy on a leafy street in San Jose, Calif. After six months of aggressive hunting, they were on their way to a small suburban home of their own after spending most of their 20s in noisy city centers. “It was so quiet, it just seemed weird to speak out loud,” Jimenez Smith said. “We lived over a freeway entrance in San Francisco. It was always loud and we were always surrounded by people. It’s a big change.” Like the couple from San Francisco, who are 28 and 30, other millennials are starting to follow in the footsteps of earlier generations and buy suburban houses after fueling a boom in city apartments. The share of 25- to 35-year-olds who own homes, which had been falling since 2005 as renting grew in popularity, rose slightly in 2017, according to a Stateline analysis of census microdata from IPUMS-Current Population Survey.

This paper examines the effect of ethnic enclaves on economic outcomes of Norwegian immigrants in 1910 and 1920, the later part of the Age of Mass Migration. Using different identification strategies, including county fixed effects and an instrumental variables strategy based on chain migration, I consistently find that Norwegians living in larger enclaves in the United States had lower occupational earnings, were more likely to be in farming occupations, and were less likely to be in white-collar occupations. Results are robust to matching method and choice of occupational score. This earnings disadvantage is partly passed on to the second generation.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Simon Feeny, Massimiliano Tani and the seminar participants at RMIT University as well as the anonymous referee for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are indebted to Laura Moate for her research assistance on this paper. Abstract Several previous studies focus on whether graduates from higher quality universities command higher wages. These papers typically proxy for quality through students' entrance exam scores, smaller classes, university-level rejection rates, and faculty wages. The common view is that these are mechanisms in which human capital is typically transferred from the university to the student. Our hypothesis is that in addition to typical human capital factors, the accumulation of social capital is also a strong driver for short-term labor market success. This study decomposes university characteristics into human and social capital proxies to test their effect on the median wages of over 300,000 recent graduates from 940 tertiary institutions in the United States. Our findings confirm previous findings that suggest that both entrance exam and choice of degree are strong predictors of graduate wages. Yet our results also suggest that students graduating from both party schools and Catholic 2 institutions are commanding a small wage premium, indicating that the social engagement offered at these universities persist into the work force. JEL: I21; I28

While Roe enshrined the right to safe, legal abortion in concept, it did nothing to ensure that those services would be available or affordable. The Hyde Amendment, passed yearly by Congress in federal appropriations legislation, bans federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment.2 As first introduced by Representative Henry Hyde III (R-IL) in 1976, it banned only federal Medicaid coverage of abortion. After the Hyde Amendment was introduced, and subsequently passed each year since, similar policies have proliferated throughout appropriations legislation, with similar amendments finding their way into nearly every spending bill. Currently, restrictions on abortion coverage deny affordable abortion services to a growing segment of the population, including: Medicaid-eligible individuals and Medicare and CHIP beneficiaries; Federal employees and their dependents; Peace Corps volunteers; Native American communities; individuals in federal prisons and detention centers, including those detained for immigration purposes; military personnel and veterans, use by the District of Columbia of its own funds for abortion coverage for low-income people.

Modern business cycle theory focuses on the study of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that generate aggregate fluctuations similar to those experienced by actual economies. We discuss how these modern business cycle models have evolved across three generations, from their roots in the early real business cycle models of the late 1970s through the turmoil of the Great Recession four decades later. The first generation models were real (that is, without a monetary sector) business cycle models that primarily explored whether a small number of shocks, often one or two, could generate fluctuations similar to those observed in aggregate variables such as output, consumption, investment, and hours. These basic models disciplined their key parameters with micro evidence and were remarkably successful in matching these aggregate variables. A second generation of these models incorporated frictions such as sticky prices and wages; these models were primarily developed to be used in central banks for short-term forecasting purposes and for performing counterfactual policy experiments. A third generation of business cycle models incorporate the rich heterogeneity of patterns from the micro data. A defining characteristic of these models is not the heterogeneity among model agents they accommodate nor the micro-level evidence they rely on (although both are common), but rather the insistence that any new parameters or feature included be explicitly disciplined by direct evidence. We show how two versions of this latest generation of modern business cycle models, which are real business cycle models with frictions in labor and financial markets, can account, respectively, for the aggregate and the cross-regional fluctuations observed in the United States during the Great Recession.

We use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation (Logan and Parman 2017) which can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition to review the evidence of changes in segregation over time. This household-measure of segregation reveals high levels of Southern segregation and rising levels of segregation in not only cities but in rural communities as well over the first half of the twentieth century. We review new evidence that this segregation was highly correlated with interracial violence in the form or lynchings. We conclude with a discussion of the interaction between residential segregation, racial animosity, and violence.