After more than a year of litigation in the lower courts, the Supreme Court will soon have the opportunity to make a decision on the constitutionality of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. A decision in United States v. Texas is expected before the end of June 2016. The ruling on Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)1 will impact the lives of nearly 4 million immigrants and their families. California has a large stake in what ultimately gets decided — beyond the sheer number of DAPA- and expanded DACA-eligible immigrants, an unfavorable decision’s ramifications could reverberate through the current and future economic and social foundations of the state. However, a favorable decision — one that recognizes the Secretary of Homeland Security’s authority to grant temporary protection from deportation and work authorization to certain qualified immigrants — can empower and strengthen households and families, promote broad social and civic inclusion, and enhance economic prosperity to all communities throughout the state. The following brief highlights the benefits of DAPA- and expanded DACA-eligible immigrants, shedding light on their impactful contributions to the state of California.

The Christina River Basin is an invaluable source of water for more than half a million people. Thus, sustainable management of the basin is vital for maintaining and improving the health of this resource while addressing projected changes in climate. For this reason, the objectives of this study include examining changes in population density, land use land cover, impervious cover and precipitation, and analyzing the relationship between urbanization, streamflow and water quality. Population data from 1970 onward and land use data from 1990 onward are observed to quantify urbanization of the basin, while precipitation, streamflow and water quality data are analyzed to identify and understand effects of this urbanization on the hydrology of the Basin. ArcGIS and Microsoft Excel are utilized for this study for the analysis and mapping. Results of the analysis show a definite increase in population density across the majority of the basin, with some of the 38 subwatersheds increasing by greater than 1,500 people per square mile on the outskirts of Newark, DE and others increasing by as much as 1,000 people per square mile on the outskirts of Downington, PA. A decrease in population density occurs in the Wilmington and New Castle, DE area with as much as an 800 people per square mile decline. Between 1990 and 2010, a significant portion of agriculture and forest land uses were lost as they converted to urban land uses. Urban uses occupy nearly 9% more of the Basin’s area by 2010, while agriculture has decreased by 7% and forest by 4.4%. This has lead to a significant increase in impervious cover across most of the basin as well. Precipitation at two representative precipitation gages show negligible changes over the time frame. The streamflow-precipitation analysis demonstrates very little change in peak flows and highest ten discharge events, or flash floods. While trends are positive at the majority of the five. . .

We propose a model in which rising supply of experience reduces experienced workers relative wages, and also negatively and systematically impacts their labor market participation. We then quasi-experimentally investigate the existence of these effects, using variation across US local labor markets (LLMs) over the last 50 years and instrumenting experience supply by the LLMs age structures a decade earlier. We find that aging drastically reduces the labor market participation of experienced relative to inexperienced workers; increasing their welfare-, disability-, and especially social security claims. Aging also reduces the (relative) migration of older workers into the aging LLMs. All of these reactions are mainly driven by low-skilled and low-earning workers. Our results imply that the effect of demographic change on the labor market is substantially more severe than previously recognized; it systematically impacts labor market outcomes beyond wages.

This paper uses a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the impacts of taxes on firm entry rates between neighboring states. We utilize matched county pairs as an approximate bandwidth around the discontinuity in state policies imposed at their border. This estimation strategy controls for unobserved location specific determinants of firm entry, as well as policy responses to shocks shared across borders. We estimate this impact using a sample of 107 state-border pairs between 1999 and 2009. We add to the literature by using the large array of top marginal tax rates, including property, income, sales, corporate, capital gains, workers compensation, and unemployment insurance tax rates. This controls for joint changes in tax rates that governments may implement to accomplish policy goals. Our results indicate that property, sales, and income taxes have the largest negative effect on firm start up rates.

This research brief is an update of Rock the Naturalized Vote: The Size and Location of the Recently Naturalized Voting Age Citizen Population, a report released in the fall of 2012 that sought to illustrate the importance of the potential immigrant vote in that years presidential election. The report was timely given the state of policy and political play around immigration at that time. For example, by the end of President Obamas first term, the Dream Act had been re-introduced twice and failed both in 2010 and 2011, pushing President Obama to issue administrative relief to the would-be Dream Act students in the form of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). At the same time, lack of federal action had pushed states to take steps to define their positions on immigration, with two states in particular, California and Arizona setting forth the most progressive and the most anti-immigrant policies, respectively. By the time the 2012 election came around, the mix of events had simmered and made immigration an important topic of debate, especially for Latino voters.

Physician undersupply in rural areas remains a problem, despite efforts to improve the workforce distribution.1 Rural origin, age, and sex have been linked to physician choice of rural settings.2 An additional factor may be that many physicians have highly educated spouses with independent careers, which may constrain their ability to locate in rural areas.3 We investigated the prevalence of physicians with highly educated spouses and whether having such a spouse was associated with working in rural underserved areas.

Approximately 46 percent of workers in Duluth, Minnesota1 lack paid sick time, and low-income and part-time workers are especially unlikely to be covered. Access to paid sick time promotes safe and healthy work environments by reducing the spread of illness2 and workplace injuries,3 reduces health care costs,4 and supports children and families by helping parents to care for their children’s health. 5 This briefing paper presents estimates of access to paid sick time in Duluth by sex, sector of employment, occupation, part/full-time employment status, and personal earnings through analysis of government data sources, including the 2012–2014 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the 2012-2014 American Community Survey (ACS).

This paper presents an assessment of community resilience to coastal hazards in the Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) region in southeastern Louisiana. The assessment was conducted at the census block group scale. The specific purpose of this study was to provide a quantitative method to assess and validate the community resilience to coastal hazards, and to identify the relationships between a set of socio-environmental indicators and community resilience. The Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model was applied to assess the resilience of the block groups. The resilience index derived was empirically validated through two statistical procedures: K-means cluster analysis of exposure, damage, and recovery variables to derive the resilience groups, and discriminant analysis to identify the key indicators of resilience. The discriminant analysis yielded a classification accuracy of 73.1%. The results show that block groups with higher resilience were concentrated generally in the northern part of the study area, including those located north of Lake Pontchartrain and in East Baton Rouge, West Baton Rouge, and Lafayette parishes. The lower-resilience communities were located mostly along the coastline and lower elevation area including block groups in southern Plaquemines Parish and Terrebonne Parish. Regression analysis between the resilience scores and the indicators extracted from the discriminant analysis suggests that community resilience was significantly linked to multicomponent capacities. The findings could help develop adaptation strategies to reduce vulnerability, increase resilience, and improve long-term sustainability for the coastal region.

This study argues for a more nuanced approach to our understanding of the impact of economic conditions on immigration. Without differentiating the reasons why immigrants move,salient variations in temporal arrival patterns, spatial variations in immigrants settlement patterns upon arrival, and variations in labour market outcomes will remain hidden. With information on the reasons why immigrants came to the US, this study offers a novel look at the associations between immigration and macro-economic conditions. Using data from the March Supplements of the Current Population Surveys from 2000 to 2014, we find: (i) job-related immigration is only pro-cyclical if it is not employer-based, but involves low-skill immigrants in search of employment; (ii) among job-related immigrants, the attraction of gateway states declines as macro-economic conditions worsen; (iii) with respect to labour market outcomes, immigrant characteristics that provide the highest level of immunity to the ups and downs of the economy include a high educational attainment level, residence outside the gateway states, plus the privilege of having a job-in-hand rather than looking for a job upon arrival.

Socially constructed race groups have boundaries that define their membership. I study temporal trends and group-specific patterns in race and ancestry responses provided for children of interracial marriages. Common responses indicate contemporary definitions of race groups (and perhaps emerging groups); uncommon responses reveal socially defined limits of race group membership. I leverage dense, nonpublic, Census Bureau data from 1960 to 2010 to do this and include a more diverse set of families, a longer time span, and more accurate estimates than prior research. I find that the location of race group boundaries varies over time and across 11 distinct family types. Since mixed-heritage responses became possible in 1980, they have been common in most groups. Part Asians have almost always been reported as multiracial or mixed ancestry. A number of (non-Asian) mixed-heritage children are described as monoracial on the census form, particularly children with American Indian heritage. Over time, part whites are decreasingly reported as monoracially white (white race with no nonwhite ancestry). Black heritage is reported for part blacks, but monoracial black responses became nonmodal by 1980. Part Pacific Islanders show similarities to part Asians and part American Indians. Given the predominance of multiracial and mixed-ancestry Asian responses since 1980, Asian multiracial may be an emerging socially recognized race category. Black multiracial shows a similar pattern. Monoracial responses (especially common among whiteAmerican Indians and blackAmerican Indians) create important but hard-to-measure complexity in groups compositions.

Shared knowledge and the coagglomeration of occupations, Regional Studies. This paper examines the extent to which people in different occupations locate near one another, or coagglomerate. Ellison–Glaeser coagglomeration indices are constructed for US occupations and used to investigate factors influencing the geographic concentration of economic activity. Empirical results reveal that occupations with similar knowledge requirements tend to coagglomerate, and the importance of shared knowledge is larger in metropolitan areas than in states. An extension to the main analysis finds that, when focusing on metropolitan areas, the largest effects on coagglomeration are due to shared knowledge about engineering and technology, arts and humanities, manufacturing and production, and mathematics and science.

Fathers’ involvement in and influence on the health and development of their children have increased in a myriad of ways in the past 10 years and have been widely studied. The role of pediatricians in working with fathers has correspondingly increased in importance. This report reviews new studies of the epidemiology of father involvement, including nonresidential as well as residential fathers. The effects of father involvement on child outcomes are discussed within each phase of a child’s development. Particular emphasis is placed on (1) fathers’ involvement across childhood ages and (2) the influence of fathers’ physical and mental health on their children. Implications and advice for all child health providers to encourage and support father involvement are outlined.

Hot weather is a threat to human health, especially in cities, where urban heat islands (UHIs) are elevating temperatures already on the rise from global climate change. Increased vegetatio...

Se estudia el papel de la segregación ocupacional en los bajos salarios entre los inmigrantes mexicanos de primera, segunda y tercera generación en Estados Unidos. Los mexicano-americanos obtienen menores salarios que los negros porque poseen menor capital humano. Respecto a los blancos, sus salarios menores también son producto de sus retornos menores por sus características y porque se encuentran sub-representados en la cima de la estructura ocupacional. La segregación ocupacional constituye una parte importante de la brecha salarial entre nativos e inmigrantes mexicanos de primera generación. Para generaciones posteriores, la contribución de la segregación ocupacional varía entre grupos y de acuerdo con la descomposición utilizada.

In this chapter we explore the macroeconomics of time allocation. We begin with an overview of the trends in market hours in the United States, both in the aggregate and for key subsamples. After introducing a Beckerian theoretical framework, the chapter then discusses key empirical patterns of time allocation, both in the time series (including business cycle properties) and over the life cycle. We focus on several core nonmarket activities, including home production, child care, and leisure. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why these patterns are important to macroeconomics and spells out directions for future research.

We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such “abrupt transitions” for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all share a common pattern. First, a steep rising death rate followed by a much slower relaxation process during which the death rate decreases as a power law. This leads us to propose a general principle which can be summarized as follows: “Any abrupt change in living conditions generates a mortality spike which acts as a kind of selection process”. This we term the Transient Shock conjecture. It provides a qualitative model which leads to testable predictions. For example, marriage certainly brings about a major change in personal and social conditions and according to our conjecture one would expect a mortality spike in the months following marriage. At first sight this may seem an unlikely proposition but we demonstrate (by three different methods) that even here the existence of mortality spikes is supported by solid empirical evidence.

We address the impact of declining migration on the measurement of labor market health. We first document an historically significant decline in the growth rate of the U.S. foreign born population since 2000. A decomposition shows that nearly two-thirds of the decline can be attributed to declining pull factors in the U.S. Had this decline not occurred, there would have been approximately 7.2 million more immigrants present in the U.S. in 2013. Making a conservative assumption about the hypothetical likelihood of employment for these "Discouraged Immigrants," a recalculation of the Employment to Population Ratio reveals a 13% larger decline since 2000 than is shown when conventionally measured.

The purpose of the paper is to present an ongoing project of AtlasFontium.pl which is intended to serve as a platform for publishing spatially-related historical source data along with their cartographic visualization concerning polish territory. The text describes the main assumptions on which the web page was based, its current state, and characteristics.

In recent years, alternative agrifood movements have called for a wide range of reforms to the industrial food system. Although some agrifood movements focus on social justice, most activists have not targeted their reforms to farmworkers. In addition, little research has been done in recent years on hired farm labor. While existing studies have catalogued the low wages, poor working conditions, and poor health of farmworkers, little is known about stratification within the farm labor sector. This thesis brings to light previously understudied inequities among farmworkers and demonstrates that farmworker wages are stratified by race/ethnicity, immigrant legal status, and region. I frame my research largely using the group threat hypothesis, which argues that minority groups face greater discrimination (and therefore lower wages) in regions where they are a larger percentage of the population. While the group threat hypothesis appears to account for racial and immigrant pay degradation among workers in all occupations at the regional level, it does not consistently explain pay penalties for minorities in regional farm labor markets. I find that blacks earn the lowest wages in the East and Southeast and that Latinos do not earn significantly lower wages than whites in four out of the six regions. These results provide mixed support for preexisting theories and raise new questions about whether and how farmwork is similar to other occupations and industries.