The Center for American Progress projects that if every state adopted Automatic Voter Registration like the effective system used in Oregon, more than 22 million people across the country would join the voter rolls in the first year of the program alone. These new voters would then be poised to participate in making America’s political decisions. Of those 22 million new voters, almost 9.5 million are unlikely to have become registered without the convenience of AVR.

We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those who changed to very popular American names like John or William, obtained gains in occupationbased earnings of at least 14%. We show that these estimates are causal effects by using an index of linguistic complexity based on Scrabble points as an instrumental variable that predicts name Americanization. We conclude that the tradeoff between individual identity and labor market success was present since the early making of modern America.

In the latter years of the past millennium, Internet stocks soared before crashing. Housing prices boomed between 2000 and 2006, even in areas where housing supply is essentially unconstrained, and then busted after 2007. The housing market . .

Alaska’s state government faces an unprecedented challenge, with the need to close an estimated $3 billion gap between projected revenues and expenditures in fiscal year 2017. Total unrestricted state General Fund revenue in fiscal year 2016 (the 12 months ending June 30, 2016) was $1.3 billion, or about $1,800 per resident. That was barely more than the state dispenses annually to Alaska school districts, to support public education (Alaska Office of Management and Budget, Enacted Fiscal Summary). Despite low oil prices and declining production, petroleum revenues still accounted for 72 percent of these funds (Alaska Revenue Sources Book, Fall 2016, Alaska Department of Revenue, Tax Division). Alaska is the only state that does not have either state income or sales taxes. It is clear that Alaskans will soon have to accept some form of broad-based revenue measure to enable continued funding of basic public services. A 2016 analysis by ISER researchers discussed the potential effects on Alaska’s economy and households of various options to reduce expenditures and increase revenues.1 That study examined how the effects of revenue measures varied for Alaska households with different levels of income. These same revenue measures and expenditure cuts are also likely to have a much bigger effect on some households than others, depending on the presence and number of children in the family. This study extends the previous analysis by specifically examining how different options would be likely to affect families and children. Many large expenditures in the state budget can easily be identified as specifically benefiting children. These include state-funded programs such as the Alaska Public School Foundation program and the Division of Juvenile Justice and Office of Children’s Services, for example, as well as joint federal-state programs such as Medicaid and Denali Kidcare. Less obvious are the effects on children of potential measures to fund these and other state expenditures. This study focuses on describing and quantifying the effects of alternative state revenue options on Alaska families and children. In addition to considering how the revenue measures might affect families with children compared to households without children, we also consider how the burden of each measure might differ for rural and urban families.

In the modern pursuit of the American Dream, people move around the country for jobs, education, or a different quality of life. In Montana, one in seven people moved in the past year, or roughly 15% of the population. While over half of movers stay within their own county, the remainder move long distances from other states or between counties in Montana.1 Migration of people into and around Montana is important for labor force and economic growth. Montana’s well-dispersed cities and large rural areas in between make moving necessary for many workers seeking jobs. Many employers also rely on workers’ willingness to move to staff their businesses. This month’s article explores the migration of workers into, out of, and within Montana to highlight its role in Montana’s economy.

This paper explores historical patterns of racial segregation and its relationship with the observed spatial variation in contemporaneous economic mobility established in Chetty et al. (2014). We combined data from the Equality of Opportunity Project with a novel measure of racial segregation developed in Logan and Parman (forthcoming) and find that past racial segregation explains a significant portion of the spatial variation in intergenerational mobility. These findings are consistent with models showing that persistent institutional factors may drive long-term outcomes across areas. Racial segregation and the environment that fosters it may diminish upward economic mobility by reducing access to networks, labor and capital markets, and political institutions. If so, then reducing the impact of these persistent processes may be key to mitigating current-day gaps in wealth, income, and overall well-being.

This report describes the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) effects on nonelderly veterans' insurance coverage and demand for Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care and assesses the coverage and VA utilization changes that could result from repealing the ACA. Although prior research has shown that the number of uninsured veterans fell after the ACA took effect, the implications of ACA repeal for veterans and, especially, for VA have received less attention. Besides providing a new coverage option to veterans who are not enrolled in VA, the ACA also had the potential to affect health care use among VA patients.

There has been a steady decline over six decades in the share of adult men in the labor force. After five decades of historic increases, in 2000 the share of women in the labor force peaked and has declined slightly since. The 1996 welfare reform law imposed work requirements on mothers on welfare and increased employment among single mothers. But the work rate of single mothers has declined or stagnated since 2000. Millions of households have no earnings and are dependent on public benefits. Other public benefit programs also have provisions designed to increase work rates, but they have met with only modest success. The major purpose of this paper is to propose a new system of experiments, coordinated by a federal board with representation from cabinet agencies, to encourage state demonstration programs that would develop and test new ways to promote work and training across welfare programs and, thereby, increase the labor force participation rate of men and women, especially parents.

To assess the employment opportunities of older job-changers in the years prior to retirement, this study examines the how the breadth of occupations in which they find employment narrows as they age past their prime working years and how this differs by gender and educational attainment. The results indicate that workers who change jobs in their early 50s find employment in a reasonably similar set of occupations as prime-age workers, with opportunities narrowing at older ages. They also indicate that job opportunities broadened significantly for better-educated older workers since the late 1990s. While job opportunities now narrow significantly for less-educated men in their late 50s, this narrowing primarily occurs in the early 60s for women and better-educated men. In contrast to previous research, the study finds that employer policies that emphasize hiring from within are less important barriers to the hiring of older job-seekers. The study also finds that the narrowing of job opportunities is associated with a general decline in job quality as measured by median occupational earnings, a decline associated with differences in occupational skill requirements and the underlying economic environment. These results suggest that older hiring is not as limited to a select few occupations as it had been in previous decades, and that policy reforms aimed at increasing opportunities and improving labor market fluidity might best be served if they focused on less-educated men.

I develop a learning-by-doing theory of cultural assimilation, in which an individual's cultural identity is determined by past investments in culture-specific social capital. The model incorporates several empirically relevant aspects of assimilation that have been difficult to explain in past models. The mechanism in my model yields two possible qualitative outcomes of the assimilation process, depending on the in-tertemporal complementarities of investment. The first, in which individuals become more homogeneous over time, has been used to explain immigrants' wage assimilation. The second, in which individuals become more heterogeneous as some assimilate and some do not, has vastly different implications for immigration and integration policies. Using detailed datasets from three immigrant destination countries, I provide a variety of evidence from linguistic, identity, and religiosity measures that cultural assimilation (in contrast to economic assimilation) most closely resembles the second type of process. * Many thanks to

This paper charts the growth and development of the Latino population of the northeastern U.S. from 1970 to 2015. The relatively small population dominated by Puerto Ricans and concentrated in New York and a few other cities has evolved into a large, diverse, and more geographically dispersed population. It grew from 1.9 to 7.7 million persons and rose from 3.8% to 10.5% of the regional population. It has increasingly suburbanized with roughly equal numbers of Latinos living in cities and suburbs. They are the most diverse Latino population of all regions in the U.S., they are not dominated by Mexicans, they are predominantly documented, and the large majority are citizens.

How has the diversity of post-1965 immigration to the United States influenced newcomers housing experiences and civil societys housing support systems? Planning scholars have shown immigrations role in revitalizing cities and housing markets, but we have done less to parse the variety of housing problems that immigrants experience and the ways civil society addresses them. This article examines the recent history of civil society organizations housing support strategies in Chinese, Southeast Asian, and African communities in Philadelphia. We find that the diversity within and between groups has shaped largely distinct institutional ecosystems and approaches to housing support.

We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate the extent to which college major decisions were affected during and after the Great Recession with special attention to business and STEM fields, as well as the heterogeneity by gender, race/ethnicity and combinations of race/ethnicity and gender. Several conclusions are reached. First, we see an overall increase in the frequency of STEM majors but a decrease in the frequency of business majors during and after the Great Recession. Second, the increase for STEM fields is spread across several detailed STEM fields, while the decrease in business majors is especially concentrated among finance and management. Third, we find strong heterogeneous effects by gender and race/ethnicity. Males are pushed away from business majors, while both males and females are pushed toward STEM majors; certain racial groups, such as white and Asian, seem to be affected more than others.

The formation and stability of social hierarchies is a question of general relevance. Here, we propose a simple model for establishing social hierarchy via pair-wise interactions between individuals and investigate its stability. In each interaction or fight, the probability of “winning” depends solely on the relative societal status of the participants, and the winner has a gain of status whereas there is an equal loss to the loser. The interactions are characterized by two parameters. The first parameter represents how much can be lost, and the second parameter represents the degree to which even a small difference of status can guarantee a win for the higher-status individual. Depending on the parameters, the resulting status distributions reach either a continuous unimodal form or lead to a totalitarian end state with one dominant high-status individual and all other individuals having zero status. However, we find that in the latter case long-lived intermediary distributions often exist, which can give the illusion of a stable society. Moreover, by implementing a simple, but realistic rule that restricts interactions to sufficiently similar-status individuals, the stable or long-lived distributions acquire highstatus structure corresponding to a dominant class. We compare our model predictions to human societies using household income as a proxy for societal status and find agreement over their entire range from the low-to-middle-status parts to the characteristic high-status “tail”. We discuss how the model provides a conceptual framework for understanding the origin of social hierarchy and the factors which lead to the preservation or deterioration of the societal structure.

The US Immigration Act of 1965 increased inflows from previously under-represented countries, mainly from Asia and Latin America. Using data from multiple US Censuses, this paper studies the wage-assimilation profiles of a group of immigrants from ‘new’ Asian countries arriving in the USA after 1965, and compares their profiles to those of immigrants from ‘old’ Asian countries also arriving in the same period. The wage-gap versus natives widens for all cohorts from new Asian countries after the second decade of stay. Cohorts from old Asian countries, who have a longer history of representation in the USA, follow the well-documented narrowing albeit concave wage-gap profiles. The differences in slopes between new and old Asian cohorts are considered in the light of comparatively larger increases in new-Asian inflows, the formation of regional occupation niches among new Asian groups and their growing segregation vis-à-vis white workers after 1965. A conceptual framework examines the case if occupations are imperfect substitutes, and natives and immigrants are worse substitutes than entrant and established immigrants within occupations—the wages of the established immigrants may fall in response to a large inflow of entrants.

Over the past Century, the car has become an integral part of American society. While automobiles allowed people to travel with unprecedented mobility and independence, they also became a major source of health hazard. Despite large declines in recent decades, motor vehicle deaths still remain significant and are understudied in the discipline of demography. This dissertation looks “under the hood” to reveal and explain patterns of motor vehicle fatalities at the population-level. In the first chapter, I examine why higher unemployment rate is associated with lower motor vehicle death rate. Using state-level data from 2003 to 2013, I find that fatal crashes involving large trucks explain the strong fluctuations between macroeconomic conditions and motor vehicle deaths. Chapter 2 describes the historical changes in the black-white differentials in motor vehicle fatalities. I find that changes in tripmaking rates, risk of death, and socioeconomic status between blacks and whites all play a role in explaining this differential. In chapter 3, I delve further into the current black-white differentials in motor vehicle fatality rates and quantify the extent to which travel amount and risk of death account for these differences. The results show that blacks experience higher motor vehicle fatality rates compared to whites because they are at higher risk of dying when . . .

Public approval rates for marijuana legalization in the United States have been rising dramatically for two decades and presently stand at 60%, pointedly raising the question of whether federal prohibition should continue. Many individual states have made legislative changes to reduce or eliminate penalties for marijuana use, possession, and in some cases sales. Here I investigate whether impacts to labor productivity are visible from these changes. To do so, I construct a panel of state-level data from 2000- 2014 and use a difference-in-difference model to investigate labor productivity overall and also in selected sectors (mining; construction; arts, entertainment, & recreation; and accommodations & food service). I find evidence that marijuana liberalization produces a decrease in overall labor productivity, but not evenly across sectors, and that the effect is spread over several years and slightly delayed. The average effect is a decrease in productivity peaking at about $1,300 per employee (1.3%) in the year following the policy change.

This article evaluates linkage quality achieved by various record linkage techniques used in historical demography. The author creates benchmark, or truth, data by linking the 2005 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Social Security Administration's numeric identification system by social security number. By comparing simulated linkages to the benchmark data, she examines the value added (in terms of number and quality of links) from incorporating text-string comparators, adjusting age, and using a probabilistic matching algorithm. She finds that text-string comparators and probabilistic approaches are useful for increasing the linkage rate, but use of text-string comparators may decrease accuracy in some cases. Overall, probabilistic matching offers the best balance between linkage rates and accuracy.

This article examines how Hispanic immigrants are economically incorporated into Newburgh, New York, a new immigrant destination historically characterized by a weak economy, high levels of poverty and unemployment. More specifically, I examine (1) the transformation of the labor market in light of increased migration; (2) the impact Hispanic immigrant workers may have on the labor market opportunities of the native population, specifically blacks; and (3) the role of targeted employer preferences on the shifting occupational composition of the area. It might be too early to speak of complete displacement, but data point to the formation of Hispanic immigrant occupational niches in occupations that do not require high levels of educational attainment to the detriment of their black counterparts. These patterns however, need to be interpreted through the lens of social networks, labor force nonparticipation and discriminatory and exploitative employer preferences.

Multiple job holding (MJH) rates differ substantially across U.S. regions, states, and metropolitan areas. Rates decrease markedly with respect to labor market size. These patterns have been largely overlooked, despite being relatively fixed over (at least) the past 20 years. This article explores explanations for these persistent differences. We account for roughly two‐thirds of the mean absolute deviation in MJH across local labor markets (MSAs). The results suggest that variation in MJH across labor markets is driven by labor market differences in job opportunities and worker preferences. Most important in explaining variation in MJH are MSA industry and occupation structure, ancestry shares, commute times, and, to a lesser extent, labor market churn.