This paper examines mechanisms driving the more rapid increases in wage inequality in larger cities between 1980 and 2007. Production function estimates indicate strong evidence of capital-skill complementarity and increases in the skill bias of agglomeration economies in the context of rapid skill-biased technical change. Immigration shocks are the source of identifying variation across cities in changes to the relative supply of skilled versus unskilled labor. Estimates indicate that changes in the factor biases of agglomeration economies rationalize at least 80 percent of the more rapid increases in wage inequality in larger cities.

Background: Private health insurance (PHI) represents the largest source of insurance for Americans. Hispanic Americans have one of the lowest rates of PHI coverage. The largest group in the US Hispanic population are Mexican Americans; they account for about two in every three Hispanics. One in every three Mexican Americans aged 64 years and under did not have health insurance coverage. Mexican Americans have the most unfavorable health insurance coverage of any population group in the nation. Objectives: The objective is to determine the factors associated with the gap in PHI coverage between Mexican American and non-Hispanic American men. Methods: This study used the National Health Interview Surveys (2010-2013) as the sample. A non-linear Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was run, estimating the explained and unexplained gap in PHI coverage between the groups. Several robustness tests of the model were also included. Results: This study estimates that 44.4% of employed Mexican American men are covered by PHI compared to 79.5% of non-Hispanic American men. Nearly 60% of employed Mexican American men were found to be foreign born, 35% have an educational attainment less than a high school degree, and 40% are likely to have language barriers. Decomposition results show that income, low educational attainment, being foreign-born, and language barriers diminished the probability of private health insurance coverage for Mexican Americans, and that 10% of the gap is unexplained. Conclusions: Most of the difference in the PHI rate between Mexican American men and non-Hispanic men is explained by observable differences in group characteristics: education, language, and immigration status. About 10% of the difference can be attributed to discrimination under the traditional interpretation of an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The PHI rate gap is large and persistent for Mexican American men.

Bronson and Mazzocco (2017) document a strong and negative relationship between changes in cohort size and changes in marriage rates for both women and men. This empirical pattern is puzzling if interpreted using insights derived from the previous literature and a two-sided matching modeì a la Becker, which predicts that an increase in cohort size should reduce the marriage rate of women, but increase the marriage rate of men. In this paper, we investigate the mechanisms behind the negative relationship using a standard dynamic search model of the marriage market. We first show that the model we consider is rejected by the data for the same reason the Becker-style matching model is rejected: it predicts that a rise in cohort size should reduce the marriage rate of women, but increase the marriage rate of men. We then develop two variations of the search model and show that they are both able to generate the observed relationship between cohort size and marriage rates. Lastly, we derive a testable implication for the two models based on the relationship between cohort size and divorce rates and provide evidence that only one model is not rejected by the data.

This study examines the effect of increasing minimum wage at a city-wide level on the enrollment in means tested public assistance programs. I exploit San Francisco’s minimum wage increases in 2011 and 2012 and use data from IPUMS-CPS to estimate the effect on welfare programs. Using a linear probability model and a difference-in-difference estimation, my analysis suggests that San Francisco’s minimum wage increases have a positive effect on the enrollment of welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid and is statistically significant.

Why do high-income blacks live in neighborhoods with characteristics similar to those of low-income whites? One plausible explanation is wealth, since homeownership requires some wealth, and black households hold less wealth than white households at all levels of income. We present evidence against this hypothesis by showing that wealth does not predict sorting into neighborhood quality once race and income are taken into account. An alternative explanation is that the scarcity of high-quality black neighborhoods increases the cost of living in a high-quality neighborhood for black households with even weak race preferences. We present evidence in favor of this hypothesis by showing that sorting into neighborhood racial composition is similar across wealth levels conditional on race and income.

Purpose This paper aims to detail the use of ESRs ArcMap in the undergraduate history classroom, as an example of pedagogical inquiry and as a method for integrating digital humanities (DH) tools and methods directly into humanities research and pedagogy. Design/methodology/approach This class is an example of pedagogical inquiry and a method for integrating DH tools and methods directly into humanities research and pedagogy. Findings With this approach, students see the immediate application of DH to traditional humanities objects of study and aid these in the pursuit of innovative research questions and methods. Originality/value The use of DH in traditional humanities classrooms as a central concept with experts from the libraries integrated into course design and project planning is unique and is a model that could be implemented at other institutions.

Immigrants have been found to promote trade with their countries of origin. In this study, we show that immigrants can also affect trade with other (third party) countries, and investigate which immigrants do that as well as the likely channels. We provide evidence for inter-ethnic spillover effect due to immigrant language skills by showing that immigrants who speak the same non-native language as residents of trading partner country increase both exports to and imports from it, even if they reside in geographically distant countries with a different official language. Results suggest common native language has an additional export promotion spillover effect over and above spoken language, suggesting a special role of ethnic ties. Immigrants from countries geographically proximate to trading partner country are found to promote exports but not imports. The magnitude of the trade promotion effect of the most trade-relevant third party country immigrant groups is comparable to the trade promotion effect of immigrants from trading partner country.

This paper presents a novel analysis about marriage in the United States in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and its relation to socioeconomic status. We document the following facts: 1) Already in the mid-19 th Century there was a socioeconomic gradient in marriage rates-men and women born to families in the bottom quartile of the occupational earnings distribution were more likely to marry than those in the top quartile. The gradient had grown steeper by the middle of the 20 th Century. 2) The increase in gradient is explained in part by increased income divergence across U.S. regions, together with a regional gradient in marriage rates, and by an increased socioeconomic gradient within regions. 3) Age at marriage follows an inverted U-shape, and exhibits both a socioeconomic and a regional gradient. Both gradients become steeper over time. 4) There is a substantial increase in the degree of assortativeness by socioeconomic status over this period. This is accounted for in about equal measure by regional income divergence, and increased assortativeness within regions. 5) The mean age gap between spouses also declines over time but it explains very little of the change in assortativeness by socioeconomic status. The overall picture is one of a society that was becoming more segmented along the marriage dimension. This increased segmentation is explained only in part by income divergence across geographic regions.

La desigualdad ha aumentado en décadas recientes a lo largo del mundo. Latinoamérica ha sido una excepción a lo que, por lo demás, parece ser la tendencia prevalente en los Estados Unidos, Europa y Asia. En los Estados Unidos, la acentuación de la desigualdad desde los años 1970 ha coincidido con el aumento de la migración mexicana. En México, la desigualdad ha disminuido desde mediados de la década 1990, periodo durante el que la emigración a los Estados Unidos se elevó, primero a niveles nunca antes visto, para luego declinar de manera abrupta. Nuestra revisión bibliográfica sugiere que la inmigración de mano de obra poco calificada a los Estados Unidos, en gran medida . . .

En estas páginas se sintetizan los intereses de un proyecto de investigación en curso329, que procura vincular dos grandes campos de estudio: las migraciones (internacionales e internas) y los trabajos de cuidado en Argentina. A nivel internacional, en las últimas décadas ese vínculo ha sido objeto de un importante desarrollo de investigaciones en términos de “migraciones de cuidado”, las cuales implican la movilidad de mujeres para cumplir con actividades de cuidado remunerado (de hogares y personas dependientes) en otros países y regiones, en vistas de suplir las carencias en cuidado generadas por el debilitamiento de los servicios sociales públicos y la . . .

Mental illnesses are prevalent in the United States and globally. Cost is a critical barrier to treatment receipt. We study the effects of recent and major eligibility expansions within Medicaid, a public insurance system for the poor in the U.S., on psychotropic prescription medications for mental illness. We estimate differences-in-differences models using administrative data on medications for which Medicaid was a third-party payer over the period 2011 to 2017. Our findings suggest that these expansions increased psychotropic prescriptions by 22.3%. We show that Medicaid, and not patients, financed these prescriptions. For states expanding Medicaid, the total cost of these prescriptions was $30.8M. Expansion effects were experienced across most major mental illness categories and across states with different levels of patient need, system capacity, and expansion scope. We find no evidence that Medicaid expansion reduced a proxy for serious mental illness: suicide.

Background and Objectives: Although a clear advantage in mortality has been documented among older Hispanic subgroups, particularly the foreign-born, research examining health selectivity in morbidity life expectancies among older Hispanics are scarce. Differences in sociocultural characteristics among Hispanic subgroups may influence racial/ethnic and nativity disparities in morbidity. Research examining the heterogeneity among older Hispanic subgroups may further our understanding of why some Hispanics are able to preserve good health in old age, while others experience a health disadvantage. Thus, the primary goal of this analysis is to examine racial/ethnic, nativity, and country of origin differences in morbidity life expectancies among older adults in the United States. Research Design and Methods: We used individual-level data (1999–2015) from the National Health Interview Survey to estimate Sullivan-based life tables of life expectancies with morbidity and without morbidity by gender for U.S.-born Mexicans, foreign-born Mexicans, U.S.-born Puerto Ricans, island-born Puerto Ricans, foreign-born Cubans, and whites in mid-life (age 50), and late-life (age 65). Results: Hispanics are heterogeneous in morbidity life expectancies. Among females, U.S.-born Mexicans, foreign-born Mexicans, and island-born Puerto Ricans spent more late-life years with morbidity than whites. For men, U.S.-born Puerto Ricans were the only Hispanic subgroup disadvantaged in the number of years lived with morbidity. Conversely, foreignborn Cubans exhibited the healthiest outcomes of all groups, regardless of gender. Discussion and Implications: Reducing the risk for late-life morbidity must be informed by a comprehensive understanding of a wide range of factors that shape health among older adults. Research should avoid pan-ethnic groupings that overlook important differences in chronic disease risk profiles among Hispanic subgroups. Recognizing the various sociocultural and environmental processes that underlie Hispanic subpopulations is important for development and implementation of social and public health policies aimed at ameliorating negative health outcomes of late-life morbidity among minority and immigrant groups.

This study estimates the impact of an American rural public health program on child mortality over 1908 to 1933. Due to the absence of sanitation and child-oriented health services outside of urban areas, public and private agencies sponsored county-level health departments (CHDs) throughout the US. Variation in the location and timing of the CHDs identifies improvements in population health, which are captured entirely by children. Mortality declines emerge in infancy and gradually decay through childhood. Adversely affected areas with either an ample population of nonwhites or greater levels of preexisting infectious disease undergo larger reductions in mortality.

Many scholars suggest that visa restrictions push individuals who would have otherwise migrated legally toward illegal channels. This expectation is difficult to test empirically for three reasons. First, unauthorized migration is clandestine and often unobservable. Second, interpersonal ties between migrants and would-be migrants form a self-perpetuating system, which adapts in ways that are difficult to observe or predict. Third, empirical evaluations of immigration policy are vulnerable to endogeneity and other issues of causal inference. In this paper, we pair tailor-made empirical designs with an agent-based computational model (ABM) to capture the dynamics of a migration system that often elude empirical analysis, while grounding agent rules and characteristics with primary data collected in Jamaica, an origin country. We find that some government-imposed restrictions on migrants can deter total migration, but others are ineffective. Relative to a system of free movement, the minimal eligibility conditions required to classify migrants into visa categories alone make migration inaccessible for many. Restrictive policies imposed on student and high-skilled visa categories have little added effect because eligible individuals are likely able to migrate through alternative legal categories. Meanwhile, restrictions on family-based visas result in significant reductions in total migration. However, they also produce the largest reorientation toward unauthorized channels-an unintended consequence that even the highest rates of apprehension do not effectively eliminate. immigration policy | migration | unauthorized migration | computational modeling P olitical leaders in many Western countries have called for increased visa restrictions to control immigration. In the aftermath of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, Marine Le Pen declared, "It is essential that France recover the control of its national borders, once and for all" (1). Similarly, one of the main tenets of the Brexit campaign was to "take back control of [UK] borders" (2). In the United States, Donald Trump was propelled to victory with a campaign focused on border control and "extreme vetting" of Muslim migrants. During his early days in office, he moved to change the composition of incoming migrants and reduce flows from family-based and high-skilled channels (3). But will more restrictive immigration policies stop individuals from migrating? Many scholars suggest that visa restrictions have counterproductive effects, leading individuals to reorient to unauthorized channels (4, 5). While this expectation is prominent in theoretical literature, scholars have struggled to demonstrate it empirically. There are three fundamental empirical challenges. First, unauthorized migration is often unobservable, due to its clandestine and sensitive nature. Even the best estimates of unauthorized migration are extremely limited, are vulnerable to bias, and are often reported only in the aggregate. Second, migration flows do not result from the sum of individual decisions to migrate-they are part of a dynamic and social process. The rich literature on migrant networks holds that interpersonal ties between migrants and would-be migrants form an adaptive self-perpetuating system. As individual preferences are modulated by the nonlinear effects introduced by social interactions, networks make migration difficult to measure and predict (4, 6, 7). To date, existing research has, generally, been unable to connect decisions and social processes occurring at the micro-and mesolevels to macrolevel trends in migration (8) (however, see ref. 9). Third, drawing causal inferences in empirical evaluations of immigration policy is problematic: Policies are not exoge-nous and we, generally, cannot observe counterfactual scenarios. Taken together, empirical challenges such as these have led the International Organization for Migration to conclude that, "dis-regarding the uncertainty and complexity of migration leads to an illusion of control on the part of the decision makers.. . [and] this is why attempts at managing migration often lead to unintended consequences" (ref. 10, p. 2). We present a data-driven agent-based computational model (ABM) to examine migration for an origin-destination corridor, which is tailor-made to address these unique empirical challenges. To be clear, our paper does not model all migration into a particular destination. This would require a cross-national data collection strategy. We focus on a single origin country. Significance Would more restrictive immigration policies stop individuals from migrating? We present an agent-based computational model, calibrated using original survey and experimental data, which represents an important step in estimating the "substitution effect" whereby migrants reorient toward unauthorized channels due to changes in policy. We find that government-imposed restrictions on migrants can decrease total migration. However, some restrictions are highly ineffective while others decrease legal migration only at the cost of driving migrants into unauthorized channels. Restrictions on students and high-skilled workers are least effective in reducing migration, and restrictions on family-based visas are especially counterproductive in diverting migrants to back channels. We also find that increasing enforcement would not effectively eliminate the diversion to unauthorized channels.

Our prior research found substantial changes in uninsurance and participation1 in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) among children and parents in 2014 and 2015, the first two years of full implementation of the coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA (Kenney et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2017). In a recent publication, we showed that Medicaid/CHIP participation continued to increase among both children and parents in 2016, with 93.7 percent of eligible children participating in the programs nationally, but participation remained lower among parents than among children (Haley et al. 2018). In this brief, we build on our prior studies to examine patterns of uninsurance and Medicaid/CHIP participation among children and parents through 2016, the third full year following implementation of the major ACA coverage provisions. Key findings are as follows . . .

Marriage patterns of immigrants are an important indicator of the degree of immigrant integration into their host countries. Literature on the economics of the household has focused on the role of the sex-ratio as an important determining factor in marriage market outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand if and how the sex-ratio has changed over time and the mechanisms that may drive that change. In this paper, we explore recent changes in the sex-ratio among immigrants to the United States. First, building upon previous research, we document the nongender neutral nature of declining immigration to the United States. We approach this study from two different dimensions to document some of the forces driving this change in the sex-ratio. The first approach, focusing on changes between birth cohorts, demonstrates that immigration is declining more quickly for men than it is for women, leading to a decrease in the sex-ratio from above 100 and thus bringing about more gender balanced migration. Second, we present results from an analysis of data on recently granted green cards, suggests that the sex-ratio among this population is increasing from below 100, also bringing about more gender-balance among immigrants.

The nonprofit Urban Institute is a leading research organization dedicated to developing evidence-based insights that improve people's lives and strengthen communities. For 50 years, Urban has been the trusted source for rigorous analysis of complex social and economic issues; strategic advice to policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners; and new, promising ideas that expand opportunities for all. Our work inspires effective decisions that advance fairness and enhance the well-being of people and places.

A frequent belief is that the rise of so-called “gig work” has led to the displacement of workers in a wide range of traditional jobs. This paper examines the impacts of the flagship of the gig economy—Uber—on workers employed in conventional taxi services. Our analysis exploits newly collected data on the staggered rollout of Uber across metropolitan areas in the United States and a difference-in-differences design to document that incumbent taxi drivers experienced a relative earnings decline of about 10 percent subsequent to Uber’s entry into a new market, while there are no significant effects on their labor supply. Additional evidence from a battery of placebo tests, event study estimates, and specifications using Google Trends data to capture differences in treatment intensity underlines these findings. A triple-differences design that compares changes among taxi drivers relative to bus, tractor, and truck drivers that were unaffected by the arrival of Uber, provides further supporting evidence that the diffusion of Uber has reduced the earnings potential of incumbent drivers in conventional taxi services in the United States.

Indonesia, an archipelago of roughly 14,000 islands, is home to approximately 700 languages. The instatement and development of Bahasa Indonesia as the national language is widely described as a highly successful example of language planning across the multilingual archipelago, and simultaneously as the catalyst for the endangerment of scores of local languages. In an ongoing project examining language shift in Indonesia and focusing on languages with a million speakers or more, we seek to explore this complex language ecology (Mufwene 2017) and the nature of dynamic multilingualism (Musgrave 2014) and language shift scenarios in Indonesia at multiple levels of inquiry, including sociolinguistic interviews, Indonesian census data, and a language use questionnaire, Kuesioner Penggunaan Bahasa Sehari-hari. Here we use our questionnaire data to look specifically at the relationship between identity (ethno-linguistic and regional) and language use in Indonesia with an analysis of how speakers classify and name language varieties that they report. We study the socio-geographic effect of "inner" vs. "outer" island in the Indonesian archipelago, comparing our census data results with further insight gained from our questionnaire data.

This study quantifies the economic effects of two major immigration policies aimed at legalizing undocumented individuals that entered the United States as children and completed high school: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the DREAM Act. The former offers only temporary legal status to eligible individuals; the latter provides a track to legal permanent residence. Our analysis is based on a general-equilibrium model that allows for shifts in participation between work, college and non-employment. The model is calibrated to account for productivity differences across workers of different skills and documentation status, and a rich pattern of complementarities across different types of workers. We estimate DACA increased GDP by almost 0.02% (about $3.5 billion), or $7,454 per legalized worker. Passing the DREAM Act would increase GDP by around 0.08% (or $15.2 billion), which amounts to an average of $15,371 for each legalized worker. The larger effects of the DREAM Act stem from the expected larger takeup and the increased incentive to attend college among DREAMers with a high school degree. We also find substantial wage increases for individuals obtaining legal status, particularly for individuals that increase their educational attainment. Because of the small size of the DREAMer population, and their skill distribution, legalization entails negligible effects on the wages of US-born workers.