Unemployment among U.S teenagers now stands at 16 percent. Raising the minimum wage, as many are advocating, will only make the situation worse. This report argues instead that a lower, youth minimum wage, or YMW, would result in a substantial number of new jobs for young workers.

Despite the population of Chinese in the United States increasing dramatically, there are few sociological studies focusing on the economic dimension of Chinese Americans assimilation into the White-dominant society. The lack of study can be explained by three major reasons: the traditional research approach which grouped Chinese Americans into Asian Americans, the contradiction between the influential majority-minority paradigm and the socioeconomic achievements of Chinese Americans, and data limitation. The following study examines whether Chinese Americans, by U.S. nativity and U.S. educational experience, have lower earnings than non-Hispanic native-born Whites and investigate their earning returns to occupational status. Based on the 2008 to 2012 sample data from American Community Survey, the result of this study indicates that U.S.-born Chinese Americans have achieved overall earnings parity with their White counterparts, while U.S.-educated Chinese immigrants must attain more education in order to achieve earnings parity with native workers; only the foreign-educated Chinese immigrants are most likely to be at a significant disadvantage in earnings.

Over the last couple of months, thousands of Cuban migrants were transferred from Central America to Mexico. And once at the U.S.-Mexico border, under the current interpretation of the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) and the "wet foot, dry foot" policy that grows out of it, Cubans without visas are waved into the United States and are given legal status and full access to welfare programs. During a recent trip to Laredo, Texas, my colleague Jessica Vaughan and I learned that this new wave of Cubans has been building for several years. The number of new annual arrivals nearly doubled from 2014 to 2015, and is roughly six times higher now than it was in 2009, which marked the most recent low point. (See Table 1.)

At the end of the U.S Civil War, veterans had to choose whether to return to their prewar communities or move to new areas. The late 19th Century was a time of sharp urban growth as workers sought out the economic opportunities offered by cities. By estimating discrete choice migration models, we quantify the tradeoffs that veterans faced. Veterans were less likely to move far from their origin and avoided urban immigrant areas and high mortality risk areas. They also avoided areas that opposed the Civil War. Veterans were more likely to move to a neighborhood or a county where men from their same war company lived. This co-location evidence highlights the existence of persistent social networks. Such social networks had long-term consequences: veterans living close to war time friends enjoyed a longer life.

No, entry wages simply appear flexible because of composition bias. Unemployed workers with flexible reservation wages are more likely to become re-employed than those with rigid reservation wages, so they are over-sampled in the observed wages of job finders. We document in the microdata that the wages of job finders appear to respond more to labor market conditions than the wages of job stayers, consistent with previous studies. In contrast, we show that the wages of both types of workers exhibit substantial downward nominal wage rigidity as measured using standard methods. We present a model in which employed and unemployed workers both face Calvo-style downward nominal wage rigidity. The estimated model produces substantially larger elasticities of the observed wages of job finders than of job stayers with respect to labor market conditions. Nonetheless, the model implies that the (unobserved) reservation wages of unemployed workers are nearly as rigid as the wages of employed workers. We therefore conclude that the labor market data are consistent with an important role for downward nominal wage rigidity among unemployed workers.

This paper estimates the effects of educational attainment and school quality on crime among American women. Using changes in compulsory schooling laws as instruments, we estimate significant effects of schooling attainment on the probability of incarceration using Census data from 1960-1980. Using data from the 1960-90 Uniform Crime Reports, we also estimate that increases in average schooling levels reduce arrest rates for violent and property crime but not white collar crime. The estimated reductions in crime for women are smaller in magnitude than comparable estimates for men; however, the effects for women are larger in percentage terms (relative to baseline crime rates). Our results suggest small and mixed direct effects of school quality (as measured by pupil-teacher ratios, term length, and teacher salaries) on incarceration and arrests. Finally, we show that the effects of education on crime for women is unlikely to be due to changes in labor market opportunities and may be more related to changes in marital opportunities and family formation.

This paper analyzes in detail the role of environmental and economic shocks in the migration of the 1930s. The 1940 U.S. Census of Population asked every inhabitant where they lived five years earlier, a unique source for understanding migration flows and networks. Earlier research documented migrant origins and destinations, but we will show how short term and annual weather conditions at sending locations in the 1930s explain those flows, and how they operated through agricultural success. Beyond demographic data, we use data about temperature and precipitation, plus data about agricultural production from the agricultural census. The widely known migration literature for the 1930s describes an era of relatively low migration, with much of the migration that did occur outward from the Dust Bowl region and the cotton South. Our work about the complete U.S. will provide a fuller examination of migration in this socially and economically important era.

Black women were more likely than white women to participate in the labor force from 1870 until at least 1980 and to hold jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. Differences in observables cannot account for most of this racial gap in labor force participation for the 100 years after Emancipation. The unexplained racial gap may be due to racial differences in stigma associated with women’s work, which Goldin (1977) suggested could be traced to cultural norms rooted in slavery. In both nineteenth and twentieth century data, we find evidence of inter-generation transmission of labor force participation from mother to daughter, which is consistent with the role of cultural norms.

Unemployment has become a pronounced and seemingly permanent problem in Black America. Black unemployment has routinely been twice or more as high as White unemployment for the last several decades. This pattern reflects an especially potent form of social exclusion that continues to demand the attention of social scientists and policy makers. It can rightly be called exclusion first because scholars who study unemployment tend to count as unemployed only people who are actively pursuing jobs but are unable to have them, at least momentarily, and second, because unemployment engenders an array of material and non-material deprivations that bear negatively on the quantity and quality of life among those who experience it. There is broad agreement that race is a significant factor in patterns of unemployment but much less agreement about why...

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps have weakened over time. Here, we explore the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work they do. We run regressions of job satisfaction on the share of males in an occupation. Overall, there is a strong negative relationship between female satisfaction and the share of males. This relationship is fairly stable across different specifications and contexts, and the magnitude of the association is not attenuated by personal characteristics or other occupation averages. Notably, the effect is muted for women but largely unchanged for men when we include three measures that proxy the content and context of the work in an occupation, which we label ‘people,’ ‘brains,’ and ‘brawn.’ These results suggest that women may care more about job content, and this is a possible factor preventing them from entering some male dominated professions. We continue to find a strong negative relationship between female satisfaction and the occupation level share of males in a separate analysis that includes share of males in the firm. This suggests that we are not just picking up differences in the work environment, although these seem to play an independent and important role as well.

As cities and universities grew together, their interactions and conflicts intensified and evolved. The growth of American higher education inflected the so-called “decline” of the American city, especially in the post-WWII urban renewal era. Neighborhood residents, university planners, and policymakers constructed urban “blight” in order to meet various ends, often at the expense of one another’s goals. The usefulness of the tropes of “urban decline” and “blight” for various actors’ divergent aims elided periods of intense conflict at the local level over urban futures. This contested moment produced both a falsified memory of the pre-WWII period as a “Golden Age” of university-city cooperation (when, in many cases, this was far from true) and also charged a late 1990s-present institutional and city planning focus on the possibilities of revitalization. Today—as American cities again place their hopes in a plethora of re- words: reclaim, revitalize, renewal, and redevelopment—my dissertation redirects attention to the processes of knowledge production, institutional growth, and community protests that have underpinned past and contemporary cities since the postwar period.

Florida is the United States fourth most populous state, with just under 19.4 million people in 2014 (Institute for Womens Policy Research 2016; Appendix Table II.1). Women make up a majority of its residents, totaling about 10 million of its inhabitants (Appendix Table II.1). Floridas geographic proximity to Central and South America and the Caribbean, its warm climate, and its generous tax policies (especially its lack of income tax, inheritance tax, and estate tax) shape its demographic character in particular ways: the state is more racially diverse and has larger proportions of immigrants, older women, and older men than the nation overall (Appendix Tables II.2, II.4, and II.5). This briefing paper highlights demographic information relevant to the status of women in Florida. It explores differences between women and men on a range of variables, including age, race and ethnicity, marital status, household type, immigration status, geography, and veteran status. Data are analyzed by county (when available). These demographic data have important implications for determining investments to promote gender equality, and can be used to implement policies that address the needs of women in Floridas many communities.

In 1975, consultants from Team Four Inc. advised St. Louis planners to pursue a strategy of neighborhood triage: conservation for areas in good health, redevelopment for areas just starting to decline, and depletion for areas already in severe distress. The firms recommended strategy reflected the latest thinking among urban planners, but it provoked outrage among residents of the citys predominantly black North Side, who read depletion as a promise of benign neglect. In this article, I explain how Team Four justified its advice, and why, four decades later, the controversy over its memo persists.

This paper investigates behavioral response to air quality alert programs using detailed time diary data. Specifically, we investigate whether individuals targeted by mandatory air quality warnings respond by reducing time spent in proscribed activitiesthe most important of which are outdoor activities that raise breathing and heart ratesthereby mitigating the health effects of pollutants on high-pollution days. We find that individuals engage in averting behavior on alert days by reducing the time they spend in vigorous outdoor activities by 18 % or 21 min on average. We find differential responses to alerts, with the largest responses amongst the elderly.

Public coverage options for children have expanded dramatically over the past several decades. By 2014, before the major coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were implemented, a majority of states—28 states— covered children in families with incomes up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) or higher under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), while only three states limited eligibility to children living below 200 percent of the FPL. In contrast, in 2000, shortly after the implementation of CHIP, only 11 states had eligibility levels of 250 percent of FPL or higher and 14 states had eligibility levels below 200 percent of FPL (Artiga and Cornachione 2016). Many states have also eliminated barriers to children’s Medicaid/CHIP enrollment and renewal, providing streamlined enrollment and renewal processes, greater outreach and availability of enrollment assistance, continuous enrollment, electronic data matching, and simplified verification procedures (Stephens and Artiga 2013).

This interactive graphic is part of our project exploring the more than 33,000 annual gun deaths in America and what it would take to bring that number down….

The Asian population has the highest rate of intermarriages in the United States. However, the majority of studies on Asian intermarriages lump Asians together without considering nativity or focus on native-born Asians, and there is limited research on the patterns and determinants of intermarriages among foreign-born Asians. To fill these gaps, this study examines the patterns and determinants of intermarriages among foreign-born Asians in the United States. Four research questions guide this study. First, what is the dominant pattern of intermarriage among foreign-born Asians? Second, how do different ethnic groups of foreign-born Asians differ in interracial and interethnic marriages? Third, how do intermarriage patterns differ by gender among foreign-born Asians? Fourth, what are the determinants of interracial and interethnic marriages among foreign-born Asians? This study proposes a theoretical framework that incorporates the useful ideas of social exchange theory, status inconsistency theory, and assimilation theory with the addition of migration for explaining intermarriage among foreign-born Asians. Seventeen hypotheses are proposed for testing. Data from the 2008-2012 American Community Survey are utilized to determine the patterns of intermarriages among foreign-born Asians at the national level. Multinomial logistic regression was used to test the theoretical framework and hypotheses on the determinants of intermarriages. The results show the most dominant pattern of marriage among foreign-born Asian ethnic groups was intra-ethnic marriages; followed by interracial and particularly with Whites. Foreign-born Asian females are more likely to interracially and interethnically marry rather than to marry with co-ethnics compared to foreign-born Asian males. In terms of interethnic marriages, Japanese are more likely to interethnically marry. For determinants of intermarriages among Asian immigrants the findings support the hypotheses for age, sex, income, education, English proficiency, length of residency, and migration. Results also support the majority of the hypotheses for status inconsistency on income and education across householders and spouses. The findings have implications for future research on intermarriages among foreign-born Asians and for Asian American panethnicity and solidarity.

Although evidence is increasing that climate shocks influence human migration, it is unclear exactly when people migrate after a climate shock. A climate shock might be followed by an immediate migration response. Alternatively, migration, as an adaptive strategy of last resort, might be delayed and employed only after available in-situ (in- place) adaptive strategies are exhausted. In this paper, we explore the temporally lagged association between a climate shock and future migration. Using multilevel event-history models, we analyze the risk of Mexico-U.S. migration over a seven-year period after a climate shock. Consistent with a delayed response pattern, we find that the risk of migration is low immediately after a climate shock and increases as households pursue and cycle through in-situ adaptive strategies available to them. However, about three years after the climate shock, the risk of migration decreases, suggesting that households are eventually successful in adapting in-situ.