"Superstar theory" argues that growth in top incomes is driven by a growth in market size. Despite the prominence of this superstar idea, there is no causal evidence for the effect of market size on top incomes. This paper makes use of a historical quasiexperiment to provide a causal test for “superstar effects”. The roll-out of television in the middle of the 20th century increases the size of the market an entertainer can serve. Signal interference of broadcasting signal gives rise to quasi-random variation in the location of television production. This allows me to estimate the causal effect of a market size enhancing technology on the wage distribution. I build a novel dataset that digitizes detailed entertainment industry records, information on the location of television and the entertainment market size. I link this to employment and wage records from the US census. The introduction of TV has a large and significant effects on the distribution of incomes. The number of entertainers in the top 1% of the income distribution doubles, while the market size increases more than 4-fold. The causal effect of market size on top earners is economically large and significant. At the same time the causal estimate are smaller than the OLS estimates. The estimates thus suggest that the correlation of top income and market size over states the role of superstar effects.

Over-the-counter (OTC) versions of prescription drugs can improve access and affordability. To incentivize firms to convert prescription (Rx) drugs to OTC status, the first firm to gain approval for OTC sales of a prescription (Rx) drug enjoys three years of market exclusivity granted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Firms usually, but not always, delay OTC entry until the end of their Rx patent protection. This paper studies how the FDA provision of market exclusivity affects firms’ time of entry into the OTC market and, ultimately, consumer welfare. To separate the multiple offsetting incentives in this market, I perform a structural analysis of anti-ulcer drugs, where many, but not all, molecules have been converted at varying points in their lifecycle. The model recognizes imperfect substitution between Rx and OTC drugs and allows an endogenous pricing equilibrium and dynamic OTC entry decisions. I find that OTC market exclusivity policy, which is intended to increase the number of OTC drugs, actually hurts consumers by delaying OTC entry until an Rx drug patent expires. For example, without the market exclusivity policy AstraZeneca would have introduced Nexium OTC in 2011 instead of at patent expiry in 2014. I propose an alternative policy in which market exclusivity is preserved after patent expiration to an OTC drug that is introduced more than three years earlier than patent expiration, and find that the policy eliminates the incentive of strategic delay, and enhances consumer welfare.

We measure selection among high-skilled emigrants from Germany using predicted earnings. Migrants to less equal countries are positively selected relative to nonmigrants, while migrants to more equal countries are negatively selected, consistent with the prediction in Borjas (1987). Positive selection to less equal countries reflects university quality and grades, and negative selection to more equal countries reflects university subject and gender. Migrants to the United States are highly positively selected and concentrated in STEM fields. Our results highlight the relevance of the Borjas model for high-skilled individuals when credit constraints and other migration barriers are unlikely to be binding.

The chapters in this collection cover diverse aspects of the changing meanings and boundaries of race, migration and identity in the contemporary United States. The situation in the USA has been the subject of intense policy and political debate over the past decades and the papers in this volume provide an important insight from a wide range of analytical perspectives. They provide an insight into the changing dynamics of race and migration in the contemporary environment, combining conceptual analysis with original empirical research. The concerns of this volume address global questions of relevance as well as those specific to the USA. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

On the presumption that poorer people tend to work less, it is often claimed that standard measures of inequality and poverty are overestimates. The paper points to a number of reasons to question this claim. It is shown that, while the labor supplies of American adults have a positive income gradient, the heterogeneity in labor supplies generates considerable horizontal inequality. Using equivalent incomes to adjust for effort can reveal either higher or lower inequality depending on the measurement assumptions. With only a modest allowance for leisure as a basic need, the effort-adjusted poverty rate in terms of equivalent incomes rises.

We document that, since 2011, mortgage lenders reduced credit to middle-class households by 15% and increased credit to wealthy households by 21%. Credit to low-income households was unaffected. Results hold at the individual-loan level and zip-code level, and at the intensive margin and extensive margin. The redistribution increased monotonically with the size of the lender. The collapse of the private-label securitization market, banks' risk-management concerns, wealth polarization, post-crisis policies of GSEs, or pre-crisis indebtment are unlikely to explain the results. The results appear consistent with large banks reacting more to the increased costs of origination imposed by financial regulation.

This paper presents novel evidence on the effect of legal status on workers labor market outcomes in the US and explores the impact of undocumented immigration in a labor market model featuring search frictions and non-random hiring. Firms receive applications from documented and undocumented workers and hire the worker they can extract the largest surplus from. As undocumented workers have a lower reservation wage due to their ineligibility for unemployment benefits, lower wage bargaining power and risk of being detected and removed, their wages are lower and job finding rates higher, which is consistent with the empirical evidence. An increase in the share of undocumented immigrants leads to the creation of additional jobs, but also more competition for documented job seekers. When calibrated to US data, the job creation effect dominates and undocumented immigration benefits documented workers. An increase in the removal rate mutes job creation and thus lowers the job finding rate of all workers. This detrimental effect is even larger if the removal rate increases more for employed workers (e.g. through worksite raids) because this leads to a risk premium in their wages. Using the introduction of statewide omnibus immigration laws as a measure of increased removal risk, I find evidence for muted job creation and a risk premium in immigrants wages.

Child maltreatment is a costly public health problem that contributes to morbidity and mortality in childhood with consequences that persist into adulthood. Correlations between low income and child abuse and neglect have been observed consistently over the past four decades. However, few studies have examined the relation of social safety net policies to child maltreatment using causal methods. In this study, we examine whether changes in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) cash-assistance program affected child maltreatment rates from 2004-2015 using difference-in-difference models. We find that TANF restrictions implemented by states increased victims of child maltreatment as well as foster care placements. Results underscore the consequences of federal block grant policies that give states wide discretion in determining the extent of the social safety net.

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decline in the rate of income convergence across states and in population flows to high-income places. These changes coincide with a disproportionate increase in housing prices in high-income places, a divergence in the skill-specific returns to moving to high-income places, and a redirection of low-skill migration away from high-income places. We develop a model in which rising housing prices in high-income areas deter low-skill migration and slow income convergence. Using a new panel measure of housing supply regulations, we demonstrate the importance of this channel in the data.

Stress is an event that can negatively affect the quality of life and the well-being of individuals in their workplace. Although it can be related to positive changes, its recurrence in the work environment can cause suffering in the individual and promote several types of diseases. Higher education is not free from this interference, since it is based fundamentally on the social relations that depend on the physical and emotional situation of agents in the academic universe--in particular, the teacher. This context directly affects the quality of teaching and, consequently, the capacity of the professionals trained in this environment. For this reason, several papers have been careful to understand this phenomenon, seeking ways to mitigate the negative effects produced by stress in teachers. Thus, considering the repercussion that the stress causes in the academic environment, the present study sought evidence in order to allow it to identify and analyze the levels of demand, control, and support exerted on the self-reported stress of students enrolled in the courses of Accounting Sciences of higher education institutions in Brazil. To do so, a data survey involving 714 teachers located in different regions of the country was conducted. These data were obtained with the use of the following instruments: Teacher Stress Inventory, to determine the level of stress perceived by teachers; DC-S, to specify the levels of demand, control, and organizational support; MBI, to measure the presence of burnout; Brief COPE, to indicate the prevalence of coping strategies; and UWES, to provide teachers' engagement levels. It was found that, on average, respondents reported a stress index of 82 points, measured by Teacher Stress Inventory, which represented 63% of the instrument's maximum score. With the use of DC-S, a significant level of demand (74% of the instrument) was observed, indicating that respondents feel that the academic environment is permeated by a high level of requirements. Also, it was noted that there were high levels of control for those demands (82% of the instrument), as well as for organizational support (78% of the instrument). These results resonate with the finding that teachers evaluate themselves with significant levels of professional efficacy (78% of the instrument) and low levels of exhaustion (48% of the instrument), and depersonalization (37% of the instrument), measures obtained through MBI. Regarding coping strategies, Brief COPE indicated that respondents are more inclined to adopt problem-oriented ones. From the data reported, teachers in the sample registered reasonable levels of engagement (77% of the UWES maximum level) being the indicator dedication the one with the highest score (82% of the instrument). Also, by means of inferential analysis, it was identified that the perception of demand levels, exhaustion, and use of coping strategy of social and emotional support type contributes positively to the perception of stress. In this same sense, the fact that the respondent is female and the condition of teaching only in the morning also has a positive influence. In the opposite direction, it was verified that the levels of perception of control and support in the organizational environment, the use of behavioral disinvestment coping strategies, and the use of chemical substances (as defined in Brief COPE), as well as the variables family income, teaching in the afternoon/evening or morning/evening, have a profession other than that of a teacher, and, finally, level of satisfaction with the students contribute negatively to the perception of stress. These results allow us to say that academic demands influence self-reported stress, but that this effect can be moderated by the perception of control of these demands and also by the present support in the work environment.

We explore whether early childhood human-capital investments are complementary to those made later in life. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were differentially exposed to policy-induced changes in pre-school (Head Start) spending and school-finance-reform-induced changes in public K12 school spending during childhood, depending on place and year of birth. Difference-in-difference instrumental variables and sibling- difference estimates indicate that, for poor children, increases in Head Start spending and increases in public K12 spending each individually increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced the likelihood of both poverty and incarceration in adulthood. The benefits of Head Start spending were larger when followed by access to better-funded public K12 schools, and the increases in K12 spending were more efficacious for poor children who were exposed to higher levels of Head Start spending during their preschool years. The findings suggest that early investments in the skills of disadvantaged children that are followed by sustained educational investments over time can effectively break the cycle of poverty.

This article points to a sharp decline in childrens sibling numbers (sibsize) that occurred in the United States since the 1970s and was large enough among children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) (particularly black children) to amount to a revolution in their family circumstances. It interprets sibsize decline as a source of social convergence in childrens family contexts that ran counter to trends toward social divergence caused by the rise of lone parenthood. The article is based on new estimates of differences in childrens sibsize and lone parenthood by race and maternal education generated from public-use samples from the Census of Population and Current Population Survey (CPS), focusing especially on the period 1940-2012. I discuss some methodological and substantive challenges for existing scholarship arising from the findings and point to questions for future research.

We use new county-level segregation estimates for the period of 1880 to 1940 to document a general rise in residential segregation in both urban and rural counties occurring alongside rising homeownership rates. However, we find a negative correlation between segregation and homeownership across space for both black and white households. Following Fetter (2013), we show that living in a more segregated county substantially reduced the impact of GI Bill benefits on white homeownership rates, suggesting that segregated locations potentially hindered both white and black homeownership.

This brief shares new research demonstrating the consequences of America’s racial generation gap. Using demographic and school spending data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we examine trends in the racial generation gap and its relationship to education spending in states and counties since 1990. Our findings include: While the national racial generation gap seems to have peaked and will now slowly decline, the gap is much higher and quickly growing in many states and counties. Arizona has the highest racial generation gap of any state, at 41 percentage points, and 90 counties face even higher gaps. In 154 counties, the racial generation gap has grown at least 20 percentage points since 1990. States and counties with larger racial generation gaps tend to spend less on K-12 education on a per-capita basis. Estimates suggest that every percentage-point increase in the racial generation gap is associated with a decrease in state and local per-child education spending of around 1.5 percent. Given the significant growth in the racial generation gap over time in many states and counties, this reduction in spending adds up. For example, a state with a large increase in the gap over the last 20 years, such as Nevada, would have seen about $2,600 more in spending per child (in inflationadjusted 2012 dollars) had the gap had no effect.

Using a unique micro-level U.S. panel dataset, we show that households significantly reduce their participation in the stock market during periods of high policy uncertainty. This effect is exacerbated in more uncertain environment during close gubernatorial elections and elections where incumbent governors cannot seek reelections due to term limits. Households that have higher risk tolerance and possess better ability to acquire and process information are affected less by uncertainty. This evidence suggests both risk preferences and information costs explain why uncertainty affects participation. Decline in participation reverses after the election but not fully when there is less resolution in uncertainty due to a change in the ruling party.

Improvement in human capital is often presumed to be important for state economic development, but little research links better education to state incomes. We develop detailed measures of worker skills in each state that incorporate cognitive skills from state- and countryof-origin achievement tests. These new measures of knowledge capital permit development accounting analyses calibrated with standard production parameters. Differences in knowledge capital account for 20–30 percent of the state variation in per capita GDP, with roughly even contributions by school attainment and cognitive skills. Similar results emerge from growth accounting analyses. These estimates support school improvement as a strategy for state economic development.

Efficient processing of skyline queries with partially ordered domains has been intensively addressed in recent years. To further reduce the query processing time to support high-responsive applications, the skyline queries that were previously processed with user preferences similar to those of the new query contribute useful candidate result points. Hence, the answered queries can be cached with both their results and the user preferences such that the query processor can rapidly retrieve the result for a new query only from the result sets of cached queries with compatible user preferences. When caching a significant number of queries accumulated over time, it is essential to adopt effective access methods to index the cached queries to retrieve a set of relevant cached queries for facilitating the cache-based skyline query computations. In this paper, we propose an extended depth-first search indexing method (e-DFS for short) for accessing user preference profiles represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and emphasize the design of the e-DFS encoding that effectively encodes a user preference profile into a low-dimensional feature point which is eventually indexed by an R-tree. We obtain one or more traversal orders for each node in a DAG by traversing it through a modified version of the depth-first search which is utilized to examine the topology structure and dominance relations to measure closeness or similarity. As a result, e-DFS which combines the criteria of similarity evaluation is able to greatly reduce the search space by filtering out most of the irrelevant cached queries such that the query processor can avoid accessing the entire data set to compute the query results. Extensive experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance and utility of our indexing method, which outperforms the baseline planning techniques by reducing 37 percent of the computational time on average.

Two rotavirus vaccines, Rotarix (RV1) and RotaTeq (RV5), were licensed for global use in 2006. A systematic review of 48 peer- reviewed articles with postlicensure data from 24 countries showed a median RV1 vaccine effectiveness (VE) of 84%, 75%, and 57% in countries with low, medium, and high child mortality, respectively, and RV5 VE of 90% and 45% in countries with low and high child mortality, respectively. A partial vaccine series provided considerable protection, but not to the same level as a full series. VE tended to decline in the second year of life, particularly in medium- and high-mortality settings, and tended to be greater against more severe rotavirus disease. Postlicensure data from countries across geographic regions and with different child mortality lev- els demonstrate that under routine use, both RV1 and RV5 are effective against rotavirus disease, supporting the World Health Organization recommendation that all countries introduce rotavirus vaccine into their national immunization program.

The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has not been extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with theories of social conflict. Since Southern lynching occurred in rural and urban areas, traditional urban measures of racial segregation cannot be used to estimate the relationship. We use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation (Logan and Parman 2017), which can distinguish between racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to racially segregate, to estimate the correlation between racial segregation and lynching in the southern counties of the United States. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated counties were much more likely to experience lynchings. Consistent with the hypothesis that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching, but uncorrelated with white lynching. These results extend the analysis of racial/ethnic conflict into the past and show that the effects of social interactions and interracial proximity in rural areas are as important as those in urban areas.

Uninsurance among nonelderly veterans fell by an adjusted 36 percent (3.3 percentage points) after implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Without the ACA, nonelderly veterans would have used about 1 percent more Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care in 2015–125,000 more office visits, 1,500 more inpatient surgeries, and 375,000 more prescriptions. The American Health Care Act would increase uninsurance among veterans and demand for VA care by a greater margin than simply returning to pre-ACA levels of coverage.