We study the effects of preschool attendance on children’s school progression and cognitive skills in Kenya and Tanzania. Our analysis uses novel data from large-scale household surveys of children’s literacy and numeracy skills, which also collect retrospective information on preschool attendance. Against the backdrop of a large expansion of pre-primary education, our regressions identify the impacts from within-household differences, controlling for a variety of child-specific covariates. In both countries, children who go to preschool tend to enroll in primary school late, and thus fall behind in terms of grades completed at early ages. However, once in school, they progress through grades faster and at ages 13-16 have completed about one and a half more months of schooling than their same-aged peers who did not attend preschool. They also score around 0.10 standard deviations higher on standardized cognitive tests, showing that there are important longer-term benefits from preschool in Kenya and Tanzania.

This paper analyzes the conditional distribution of salaries of Cuban immigrants to the United States of America based on a structured additive quantile (STAQ) model. In accordance with Fahrmeir et al. (2004), Kneib et al. (2009) and Fenske et al. (2012), we used a boosting algorithm in the estimation of the model specified. STAQ models are an extension of the linear quantile regression of the so-called generalized structured additive regression (STAR) models proposed by Fahrmeir et al. (2004) and Brezger and Lang (2006) This is the first attempt in the migration literature to use quantile regression in a flexible context. The data used come from the US American Community Survey. The results show that increments in earnings associated with the socioeconomic characteristics usually included in labor studies vary between the different quantiles considered. The main conclusions are that a decline in returns from education may be a sign that a high level of education no longer provides a competitive advantage and that being a black person is associated with substantially lower earnings, regardless of the individuals’ position in the earnings distribution.

This exercise reproduces and assesses the historical time-series on the top shares of the wealth distribution for the United States presented by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty's best-selling book has gained as much attention for its extensive presentation of detailed historical statistics on inequality as for its bold and provocative predictions about a continuing rise in inequality in the twenty-first century. Those predictions were derived and justified by reference to the historical data, so it is helpful to assess the robustness of the historical evidence presented. Here I examine Piketty's U.S. data for the period 1810 to 2010 for the top ten percent and the top one percent of the wealth distribution. I conclude that Piketty's data for the wealth share of the top ten percent for the period 1870-1970 are unreliable. The values he reported are manufactured from the observations Page 2 for the top one percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Pikettys data for the top one percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810-1910) are also unreliable. They are based on a single mid-century observation that provides no guidance about the antebellum trend and only tenuous information about trend in inequality during the Gilded Age. The values Piketty reported for the twentieth century (1910-2010) are based on more solid ground, but have the disadvantage of muting the marked rise of inequality during the Roaring Twenties and the decline associated with the Great Depression. The reversal of the decline in inequality experienced during the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent sharp rise in the 1980s are hidden by a twenty-six-year interpolation. This neglect of the shorter-run changes is unfortunate because it makes it difficult to discern the impact of policy changes (income and estate tax rates) and shifts in the structure and performance of the economy (depression, inflation, executive compensation) on changes in wealth inequality. This paper offers an alternative picture of the trend in inequality based on newly available data and a reanalysis of the 1870 Census of Wealth. This article does not question Piketty's integrity.

In aquatic ecosystems, biological indicators are used in concert with nutrient concentration data to identify habitat impairments related to cultural eutrophication. This approach has been less commonly implemented in coastal areas due to the dominance of physical conditions in structuring biological assemblage data. Here, we describe the use of the stable isotopic composition of Nassarius obsoletus (Say), the eastern mudsnail, as an indicator of cultural eutrophication for 40 locations in coastal estuaries in New York. We found 15N enrichment in mudsnail tissue where watersheds had high population densities, land use patterns were more urbanized, and when sampling sites were adjacent to wastewater treatment plant discharges. Stable carbon isotopes were responsive to salinity and watershed forest cover, with more saline sites reflecting a predominantly C4 or algal carbon isotopic signature and more forested sites a lighter isotopic signature reflecting greater inputs of C3 terrestrial detrital carbon. Mudsnail nitrogen isotopic composition had a high level of separation between more affected and pristine watersheds (from 6.6 to 14.1‰), highlighting its utility as an indicator. We thus propose that stable isotope values of estuarine biota, such as the eastern mudsnail, can be used in concert with water quality data to identify areas where improvements in water quality are needed and can also be used to identify sources of detrital carbon to estuarine environments.

Se estima que cerca de 244 millones de personas, en el año 2015, vivían en un país diferente al que les vio nacer. Dentro de este flujo migratorio creciente, han estado presentes, desde los años 30 del siglo pasado, los cubanos. La migración desde Cuba ha estado orientada históricamente hacia Estados Unidos, país donde viven más de 2 millones de personas de origen cubano.Para lograr entender la emigración cubana, desde el momento de la toma de la decisión de emigrar hasta la integración en Estados Unidos, se ha analizado en esta tesis quiénes son los que marchan de Cuba, lo que se explica a través de un modelo de elección binaria, centrando el análisis en la autoselección educativa. Se investiga así cómo influye la edad en el momento de emigrar, el nivel de educación y la categoría ocupacional en la probabilidad de emigrar.La asimilación laboral de los inmigrantes cubanos en Estados Unidos se ha analizado a través de la estimación de diferentes modelos de regresión utilizando la regresión cuantílica para ver la relación entre diferentes variables socioeconómicas como la edad en el momento de emigrar, el sexo, si es ciudadano norteamericano, la experiencia potencial, la raza y elnivel de inglés con el salario por hora.La regresión cuantílica permite describir la distribución condicional de una variable respuesta, como función de diferentes covariables en los diferentes puntos de esa distribución, ofreciendo una visión mucho más amplia de la relación entre esa variable respuesta, en este caso el salario ylas variables explicativas.En un primer modelo, se utiliza . . .

The U.S. H-1B visa for highly-skilled immigrant labor and the accompanying H-4 visa for their dependents leads to structural constraints that exclude dependents from the labor force. Identifying H-1B recipients from the U.S. Census and American Community Surveys, we find that—despite the labor force exclusion—the vast majority of married H-1B recipients is accompanied by their spouses. This is particularly the case for male H-1B recipients, making wives rather than husbands carry most of the burden. Using a matched sample of married immigrants with work authorization, we estimate counterfactual labor force participation probabilities and wages for the sample of dependent H-4 spouses. We find that the policy-imposed labor force exclusion of H-4 spouses leads to substantial losses of spouses’ earnings and annual aggregate productivity loss of over US$2.1 billion.

Often quantitative scenarios of future trends exhibit less variability than the historic data upon which the models that generate them are based. The problem of dampened variability, which typically also entails dampened extremes, manifests both temporally and spatially. As a result, risk assessments that rely on such scenarios are in danger of producing misleading results. This danger is pronounced in nexus issues, because of the multiple dimensions of change that are relevant. We illustrate the above problem by developing alternative joint distributions of the probability of drought and of human population totals, across U.S. counties over the period 2010-2030. For the dampened-extremes case we use drought frequencies derived from climate models used in the U.S. National Climate Assessment and the Environmental Protection Agency’s population and land use projections contained in its Integrated Climate and Land Use Scenarios (ICLUS). For the elevated extremes case we use an alternative spatial drought frequency estimate based on tree-ring data, covering a 555-year period (Ho et al 2017); and we introduce greater temporal and spatial extremes in the ICLUS socioeconomic projections so that they conform to observed extremes in the historical U.S. spatial census data 1790-present (National Historical Geographic Information System). We use spatial and temporal coincidence of high population and extreme drought as a proxy for energy-water nexus risk. We compare the representation of risk in the dampened-extreme and elevated-extreme scenario analysis. We identify areas of the country where using more realistic portrayals of extremes makes the biggest difference in estimate risk and suggest implications for future risk assessments.

Though most US migration analyses in recent years have relied upon one-year and five-year residence information, analyses of lifetime migration may be more revealing of state-level trends in relative ability to retain the native born and attract in-migrants from other states and abroad, and of the effect of such exchanges on the composition of its population in terms of education and other characteristics. This paper reviews a number of measures of native retention and migrant attraction, and examines the formal relationships among these measures; presents some state-specific lifetime migration measures as of 2006-2010, with special attention to education and the impact of immigration; analyzes the degree of change in these lifetime measures centering on 1990; and uses these measures to decompose a state's proportion of college graduates into elements that highlight the relative importance of retention and attraction and illustrates how these can contribute to appropriate policy formulation.

A consortium of Syracuse City and Onondaga County governments along with a number of local area non-profit organizations have recently organized a commission on Local Government Modernization for the Syracuse area. The Report makes three major recommendation to strengthen the local public sector in the Syracuse region: seek opportunities to share public services across local jurisdictions to reduce costs, adopt the Minneapolis region model for sharing revenues from new commercial and industrial development across localities, and work toward merging Syracuse City government with Onondaga County government. At the same time, current non-city residents would not have responsibility for the city or school district’s legacy debts or post-employment benefit obligations. The working paper reviews the urban economics and local public finance literature in the context of fiscal viability of central cities. Central cities form the heart of knowledge-based economies and those benefits redound to the entire region in the form of higher property values and incomes. In addition, suburban enclaves have developed in part through discriminatory policies and practices at the federal and local levels and they have weakened the fiscal viabilities of central cities. It also reviews the relevant local public finance literature on city annexation and government mergers, optimally sized jurisdictions, non-profit entities’ payments in lieu of taxes in cities, efficient local government taxes, and related topics. Based on the review, the economic development of a region depends on the economic and fiscal sustainability of its central city. Suburban resident benefit in tangible ways from the economic activities in their respective cities and suburban areas could reasonably devote a portion of their tax base to enhance the resources available to the city to service the city’s legacy debts and other obligations. The working paper concludes with fiscal implications for Syracuse City and its metropolitan area.

We provide the first evidence on the causal effect of border enforcement on the full spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants to the United States. We address the endogeneity of border enforcement with an instrumental variables strategy based on administrative delays in budgetary allocations for border security. We find that 1,000 additional border patrol officers assigned to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering a state decreases that state’s share of Mexican immigrants by 21.9%. Our estimates imply that if border enforcement had not changed from 1994-2011, the shares of Mexican immigrants locating in California and Texas would each be 8 percentage points greater, with all . . .

Road fatalities erase more healthy years of life than cancer and heart disease combined. Considering safety as a health impact begs the question: Who is most impacted? Are there urban/rural differences? How equitable are impacts along racial/ethnic lines or with income differences? Via spatial analysis of over 970,000 geocoded US road fatalities over a 24-year period, our results show that Americans are not bearing these impacts equitably. We find road fatality disparities across racial/ethnic lines, particularly for pedestrians/bicyclists in predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Lower income neighborhoods suffer from vehicle occupant fatality rates 3.5X higher than wealthier neighborhoods. Also, residents of our most rural areas endure fatality rates approximately 6X higher than our most urban areas. This suggests that transportation and land use planning intended to facilitate more access with less mobility can reduce unnecessary exposure and lead to outcomes on par with the safest developed countries in the world.

We study European immigration into the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (18501920), and estimate its long-term effects on economic prosperity. We exploit variation in the extent of immigration across counties arising from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant inflows and the gradual expansion of the railway. We find that locations with more historical immigration today have higher incomes, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment. The long-run effects appear to arise from the persistence of sizeable short-run benefits, including earlier and more intensive industrialization, increased agricultural productivity, and more innovation.

We document that U.S. employment polarization in the 1980-2008 period is largely generated by women. Female employment shares increase both at the bottom and at the top of the skill distribution, generating the typical U-shape polarization graph, while male employment shares decrease in a more similar fashion along the whole skill distribution. We show that a canonical model of skill-biased technological change augmented with a gender dimension, an endogenous market/home labor choice and a multi-sector environment accounts well for gender and overall employment polarization. The model also accounts for the absence of employment polarization during the 1960-1980 period and broadly reproduces the different evolution of employment shares across decades during the 1980-2008 period. The faster growth of skill-biased technological change since the 1980s accounts for most of the employment polarization generated by the model.

We assess the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) serves as an automatic stabilizer to mitigate the economy's sensitivity to shocks. Using a local labor market design based on heterogeneity in local bene…t "generosity" (de…ned as the percentage of household income recovered by the unemployment bene…t), we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in generosity attenuates the e¤ect of adverse shocks on em-ployment growth by 7% and on earnings growth by 6%. Consistent with the hypothesis that this e¤ect derives from the local demand channel, we …nd that consumption is less responsive to local labor demand shocks in counties with more generous bene…ts. Our analysis …nds that the local …scal multiplier of unemployment insurance expenditure is approximately 1.9. Overall, our results suggest that UI has a bene…cial e¤ect on the economy by decreasing its sensitivity to shocks.

With the large-scale penetration of the internet, for the first time, humanity has become linked by a single, open, communications platform. Harnessing this fact, we report insights arising from a unified internet activity and location dataset of an unparalleled scope and accuracy drawn from over a trillion (1.510^12) observations of end-user internet connections, with temporal resolution of just 15min over 2006-2012. We first apply this dataset to the expansion of the internet itself over 1,647 urban agglomerations globally. We find that unique IP per capita counts reach saturation at approximately one IP per three people, and take, on average, 16.1 years to achieve; eclipsing the estimated 100- and 60- year saturation times for steam-power and electrification respectively. Next, we use intra-diurnal internet activity features to upscale traditional over-night sleep observations, producing the first global estimate of over-night sleep duration in 645 cities over 7 years. We find statistically significant variation between continental, national and regional sleep durations including some evidence of global sleep duration convergence. Finally, we estimate the relationship between internet concentration and economic outcomes in 411 OECD regions and find that the internets expansion is associated with negative or positive productivity gains, depending strongly on sectoral considerations. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to use online/offline activity of the entire internet to infer social science insights, demonstrating the unparalleled potential of the internet as a social data-science platform.

The effect of immigration on the absorbing country is a major issue fueling public and academic debates. A foremost question is immigrants’ impact on the native population’s earnings. Using American data from 1970 to 2010, I examined the effects of immigrant proportion in a given occupation on natives’ earnings. I estimated two different types of multilevel models: a cross-sectional and a lagged dependent model of the effect of changes in immigrants’ occupational share on natives’ wage growth. The findings suggest that occupations abundantly populated by immigrants are low-wage occupations. However, in most years the increase in immigrants’ occupational share was not related to a decline in natives’ wages. These combined results cast doubt on immigration affecting native wages, and suggest that the negative view of immigration might be overstated.

Introdução: Este estudo traz a Inovação e o Empreendedorismo como caminhos para novos modelos de ensino/aprendizagem. São demonstradas aqui considerações a respeito do empreendedorismo na educação empresarial e seu suporte para a inovação.Objetivo: Descrever os modelos de educação e destacar a importância da inovação e da pesquisa, fomentando a construção do conhecimento necessária neste processo.Metodologia: A pesquisa foi estruturada a partir de um levantamento bibliográfico sobre conceitos e modelos teóricos sobre a gestão empreendedora através de uma leitura analítica, frente a identificação das características para a realização efetiva do empreendedorismo na educação de forma inovadora.Resultados: Os modelos de educação estão em processo constante de evolução, a adoção de boas práticas e novos recursos que possam auxiliar no ensino-aprendizagem como agente motivador do empreendedorismo na educação através da inovação é uma realidade a ser revista pela sociedade como um todo.Conclusões: Países desenvolvidos dão grande importância às formas inovadoras de ensino, e conhecimento. Espera-se que este estudo seja importante ferramenta para mudanças comportamentais e/ou econômicas. Trazendo a conscientização para a otimização do fluxo de competências dentro de um grupo, com o objetivo de tornar bem-sucedidos os resultados para todas as partes envolvidas que compartilharem esse conhecimento.

Adolescents of Mexican origin have higher than average school dropout rates, but the risk of school non-enrollment among this subgroup varies substantially across geographic areas. This study conducts a multilevel logistic regression analysis of data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey to evaluate whether spatial heterogeneity in school non-enrollment rates among Mexican-origin youth (n = 71,269) can be attributed to the histories of states and local areas as Mexican Latino/a receiving gateways. This study also determines whether the association between new destinations and school non-enrollment varies within the Mexican-origin population by nativity and duration of residence. Net of background controls, the risk of non-enrollment does not differ significantly between Mexican-origin youth living in states that are newer Mexican Latino/a gateways versus those in more established destinations, in part because Mexican-origin school non-enrollment rates are heterogeneous across newer destination states. At the more local Public Use Microdata Area level, however, Mexican-origin youth in newer gateways have a higher risk of non-enrollment than those in established destinations, revealing the importance of local-level contexts as venues for integration. The disparity in non-enrollment between Mexican-origin youth in new versus established destination PUMAs is apparent for all generational groups, but is widest among 1.25-generation adolescents who arrived in the country as teenagers, suggesting that local new destinations are particularly ill-equipped to deal with the educational needs of migrant newcomers.