Research on immigrant and second generation outcomes has often examined their locations, following ideas that geographic dispersion facilitates social mobility, and that characteristics of the ethnic environment enable or constrain progress. I contend that second generation socioeconomic outcomes depend in part on the location choices and characteristics of a previous immigrant generation. Further, I suggest that this relationship reflects the changing geography of immigrants and labour markets, rather than geographically unfolding assimilation. Using the 1940, 1970, and 2000 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series files from the US Census, I regress second and 1.5 generation wage and educational outcomes in 1970 and 2000 on metro-area characteristics of a previous generation (1940 and 1970, respectively). Current labour market and second generation characteristics are included as controls and to facilitate interpretation. Characteristics of a previous immigrant generation's location were more important for second generation outcomes in the 19401970 period, while current place characteristics become more significant by 2000. There is evidence of selection operating through the positive intergenerational effects of places where immigrants' educational levels were high a generation ago. Metro-level immigrant concentration and manufacturing employment also have generally positive effects, although variations across generations and by nationality suggest their significance for social mobility is inadequately understood. The historical immigrant geographies of the US, and the ways in which metro labour market conditions intersect with immigrants' locational choices, both within and between generations, are thus a critical piece of the economic and spatial assimilation puzzle.

Our main data set is based on individual-level credit bureau data from Equifax. This is the same data set used in Mian and Sufi (2011).1 The initial random sample of individuals was drawn for the year 1997 from a group of 4,025 zip codes with Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss data available. The initial sample contains 320,295 individuals. We limit the sample to the 288,042 individuals that have credit information available from 1997 to 1999. We make this restriction because there is a large amount of attrition in the initial two years, driven by individuals with very few accounts. The attrition rate is 6% in the first two years, but then is reduced to a constant 2% afterward. We include all individuals that have data available for the first three years of our sample. We have data for these individuals through 2010

Religious communities are key providers of social insurance. This paper focuses on the devastating impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to investigate how an increase in the demand for social insurance affects church membership. We find a significant increase in church membership in flooded counties. This effect is stronger in counties with severe economic losses and where access to credit was limited. We also document that fundamental denominations gained more members in flooded counties, which is consistent with the theory of club goods emphasizing the efficient provision of mutual insurance in stricter religious

The goal of this paper is to measure and decompose the wage return to a set of human skills, taking into account the self-selection of workers into their occupations. The paper combines data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79), with data from the Occupational Information Network (O*Net) and proposes an instrumental variables approach to estimate the wage return to math and language skills. To deal with the endogeneity of occupations, I instrument the importance of math for a worker's occupation in her thirties and forties (occupational choices) with the importance of math for the worker's preferred occupation back in her early twenties (occupational aspirations). A similar instrument is proposed for language skills. The total wage return to math and language skills is then decomposed between direct returns and occupational sorting effects. The paper finds that most of the wage return to language skills between 1992 and 2012 was due to occupational sorting. Math skills have a larger return than language skills and occupational sorting explained only 45% of the total wage return to math skills in 2012. The remaining 55% corresponds to direct returns, which are realized across all occupations.

Mass migration always conditions subjectivities. Whether a result of religious persecution, famine, labor shortage, or the prospect of greater prosperity, every mass movement of a people can be traced through the particular conditions under which the migrant self is formed and transformed. The shared struggles and strivings, and the peeks and valleys of the myriad of hopes, disappointments, tragedies, and joys that accompany the migration experience shape a people. The black experience with migration in the U.S. has been framed by what is commonly referred to as “The African American Great Migration”: a period between 1910 and 1970 during which approximately six million blacks migrated from the rural South to the urban centers of the Midwest, the Northeast, and, much later, out West (Grossman, 1991; Harrison, 2012; Lemann, 2011; Marks, 1989; Stewart E. Tolnay, 2003; Wilkerson, 2010). It is true that this . . .

The rapid improvement in financial conditions and the sluggish recovery of physical investment in the aftermath of the Great Recession are difficult to reconcile with the predictions of existing models that link impaired access to credit and investment. I propose a tractable model that solves this puzzle by exploiting the role of customer markets in shaping the persistent effects of financial shocks on investment decisions. In my model, firms react to a negative financial shock by reducing expenditures in sales-related activities and increasing prices to restore internal liquidity, at the expense of customer accumulation. Once financial conditions start reverting to normal levels, the firm postpones investment due to a shortage of customers relative to its existing production capacity and the need to first rebuild its customer base. This mechanism can capture two important features of the data: First, the slow recovery of investment despite improving financial conditions, and second, the positive correlation between financial conditions and investment observed during downturns and the weakening of this correlation observed during upturns.

Given two d-dimensional points p and q where d is a positive integer, p is said to dominate or pareto-dominate q, denoted by p ≺ q, if p is better than or equal to q on all dimensions and p is better than q on at least one of the d dimensions. Given a set D of d-dimensional points and a point p in D, p is said to be a skyline point in D if p is not dominated by any other points in D. A skyline query is to find all skyline points in D. Each dimension can be numeric or categorical. If a dimension is numeric, all values in this dimension are totally-ordered. For any two values in the dimension, one value is more preferable than the other value. One example of a numeric dimension is the price of a product where a smaller value is more preferable. Another example of a numeric dimension is the hotel class where a higher value is more preferable. If a dimension is categorical, the ordering on the values in this dimension is more complicated. One example is airline. Some users prefer one airline A to another airline B but do not have any inclination to prefer one airline to another airline (or vice versa). Besides, some other users prefer airline B to airline A but still do not have any inclination to prefer one airline to another airline (or vice versa). No matter whether each dimension is numeric or categorical, based on the preferences on all values in the dimension, the skyline query can determine all skyline points.

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. We develop detailed measures of skills of workers in each state based on school attainment from census micro data and on cognitive skills from state- and country-of-origin achievement tests. These new measures of knowledge capital permit development accounting analyses calibrated with standard production parameters. We find that differences in knowledge capital account for 20-35 percent of the current variation in per-capita GDP among states, with roughly even contributions by school attainment and cognitive skills. Similar results emerge from growth accounting analyses, emphasizing the importance of appropriately measuring worker skills. These estimates support emphasis on school improvement as a strategy for state economic development.

The terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” are often used interchangeably by the news media, in academia, and by business, schools, hospitals, and government agencies to describe individuals of Spanish and/or Latin American descent who live in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century, groups included under these panethnic terms are reflective of highly contested political nomenclature (Rodríguez 2009) and do not reflect underlying biological or genetic roots that differentiate the different ethnic groups. In the US Census, Latino individuals can self‐identify as both an ethnic group (e.g., Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican) and a racial group (e.g., Black, White, Asian). Thus, it is possible for an individual to identify as a Mexican‐Asian American, or a Black Puerto Rican. Because the terms Latino and Hispanic are so widely treated as the same, they are similarly used interchangeably here.

Violent crime which is referred to as crime against persons has been recognized as the most serious species of crime. Violent crime imposes monetary costs, psychological costs, and social stability disruption. Incarceration strategies used in several societies have been inefficient in deterring, incapacitating, and rehabilitating offenders of violent crime. Additional approaches to preventing and reducing violent crime are needed. This dissertation aims to address three objectives. First, empirically investigate the temporal stability of socio-economic covariates of violent crime. Second, investigate the persistence of violent crime hot spots over time, and the socio-economic factors that correlate with said persistence. Third, develop a Google Street View-based environmental audit approach to quickly and systematically collect environmental data, and explore the role of physical features of built environment in inducing and deterring violent crime.

In the mid-1970s, the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C., faced both redlining and gentrification. In response to developer-led gentrification and its accompanying displacement, the Adams-Morgan Organization used the tenant right-to-purchase clause of D.C.s 1974 rent control law to block the eviction of twenty-six families on one street. Simultaneously, the organization leveraged a community reinvestment campaign against a local thrift to obtain financing for evicted families, resulting in successful purchases and further community reinvestment lending. This research shows that tenant right-to-purchase legislation provided the legal opportunity structure necessary for community organizations to fight redlining and gentrification.

More than US$100 billion is spent annually by the U.S. federal government in income maintenance in the form of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) to workers with disabilitiesthe majority of whom are not in the labor market. Despite this large sum, however, little is known about the extent to which disability beneficiaries contribute to the economy through nonmarket work. This study uses data from the 20032012 American Time Use Survey, matched to the Current Population Survey, to provide the first nationally representative analysis of nonmarket time use among SSDI beneficiaries. A replacement wage approach is then used to assign monetary value to beneficiaries nonmarket time and to evaluate the relative contribution of that monetary value to gross domestic product (GDP) and average aggregate SSDI payments. Results indicate that beneficiaries, on average, report nearly 4.5 hr per day of nonmarket production. These inputs would comprise between .69% and .98% of total GDP if they were compensated in the market, depending on methodology and year of observation. Furthermore, the value of beneficiaries inputs exceeds the cost of average aggregate payments to beneficiaries across all years. Thus, SSDI beneficiaries report substantial production, albeit not in the market.

There is a widespread perception that trust and social capital have declined in United States as well as other advanced economies, while income inequality has tended to increase. While previous research has noted that measured trust declines as individuals become less similar to one another, this paper examines whether the downward trend in social capital is responding to the increasing gaps in income. The analysis uses data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) for the United States, and the European Social Survey (ESS) for Europe. Our analysis for the United States exploits variation across states and over time (1980-2010), while our analysis of the ESS utilizes variation across European countries and over time (2002-2012). The results provide robust evidence that overall inequality lowers an individual's sense of trust in others in the United States as well as in other advanced economies. These effects mainly stem from residual inequality, which may be more closely associated with the notion of fairness, as well as inequality in the bottom of the distribution. Since trust has been linked to economic growth and development in the existing literature, these findings suggest an important, indirect way through which inequality affects macro-economic performance.

Public mass modern education was a major pillar of state-led development in the post-Colonial period. I examine the impact of Egypt's transformation in 1951–1953 of traditional elementary schools ( kuttabs ) into modern primary schools on the Christian-Muslim educational and occupational differentials, which were in favor of Christians. The reform granted kuttabs ' graduates (where Muslim students were over-represented) access to higher stages of education that were previously confined to primary schools' graduates. Exploiting the variation in exposure to the reform across cohorts and districts of birth among males in 1986, I find that the reform benefited Muslims but not Christians. What Europe is suffering from is the result of generalizing education among all levels of society… they have no chance of avoiding what happened [Europe's 1848 revolutions]. So if this is an example in front of us, our duty is simply to teach them how to read and write to a certain limit in order to encourage satisfactory work and not to spread education beyond that point. Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt (1805–1848), in a private letter to his son, Ibrahim Pasha (in Judith Cochran 1986, p. 6) Education is like the water we drink and the air we breathe. Taha Hussein, Egyptian liberal intellectual and Egypt's Minister of Education (1950–1952) The poor go to heaven, but can't they have a share on Earth too? They are willing to give up a share in heaven in exchange for a share on Earth. Gamal Abdul-Nasser, President of Egypt (1956–1970) (Excerpt from a public speech)

Are differences in the quality of outside prospects, particularly those stemming from an economy's industrial structure, influential in generating differences in pay between workers? We focus on the gender pay gap in the U.S. during the 1980-2000 period. We develop a formal search and matching model that connects outside prospects, industrial structure and wage gaps and use it to guide our subsequent empirical work. Our results suggest that an economy's adjusted gender pay gap which controls for industry in addition to human capital characteristics is substantially influenced by gender differences in the quality of outside prospects generated by the economy's industrial structure. The effect of industrial structure via this channel is estimated to be at least as large as the mechanical (composition) effect. The mechanism can account for 25-35% of the adjusted gender gap, and around 10-15% of the variation in this gap across cities. Our estimates also suggest that the relatively sharp narrowing of the adjusted gender pay gap during the 1980s is fully accounted for by the relatively sharp decline in the outside prospects of males during this period.

We document a new finding regarding the deterioration of labor market outcomes for men in the US: Since 1980, the probability that a college-educated man was employed in a cognitive/high-wage occupation fell. This contrasts starkly with the experience of college-educated women: their probability of working in these types of jobs rose, despite a much larger increase in the supply of educated women relative to men during this period. We study a flexible neoclassical model of the labor market that allows us to shed light on the key forces capable of rationalizing these findings. The model indicates that one key channel is a greater increase in the demand for female-oriented skills in cognitive/high-wage occupations relative to other occupations. Using occupational task-level data, we find evidence that this relative increase in the demand for female skills is due to an increasing importance of social skills within such occupations. We find a strong and robust relationship between the change in the female share of employment and the importance of social skills in an occupation over time.

Communities and agencies at local, state, and federal levels have worked hard for years to meet the needs of the growing Hispanic population, particularly lowincome Hispanics,a but challenges remain. For example, it has been documented that, at least in some cases, eligible Latinos are less likely to access available social services than other populations.1-3 In part due to shifting demographics in the United States, there has also been an increased push for service providers to meet the needs of all children and families in ways that are culturally relevant. That is, there has been a push for providers to demonstrate the set of behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in an institution, agency, or among a group of individuals, that allows them to work effectively in cross-cultural situations.4 A first step toward effective cross-cultural work, however, is a clear understanding of the populations who need to be served. In this brief, we use nationally representative data from the 2014 American Community Surveyb to do two things: First, we show the number of Hispanic children who may be in need, based on their familys economic resources. These are children who might benefit from a variety of human or social service programs. Need can be variously defined, so we provide estimates for three separate groups of children: those in deep poverty, poverty (but not deep poverty), and near poverty (just above poverty) (detailed in Figure 1, and see the box on page 2). Consistent with some prior research,5-7 we identify near poverty as between 100 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level, as many experts believe that this level marks where the average U.S. family can just meet basic needs.8 Second, we show what proportion of these low-income Hispanic children lived in households that reported receipt of SNAP or TANFc in the past year.d We describe childrens circumstances across a range of available measures that are linked to program eligibility or to the availability of resources for children.

Are opportunities to get ahead growing more unequal? Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), it is possible to provide evidence on this question, evidence that is suggestive but must be carefully interpreted because the samples are relatively small. The GSS data reveal an increase in class reproduction among young and middle-age adults that is driven by the growing advantage of the professional-managerial class relative to all other classes. This trend is largely consistent with our new “top-income hypothesis” that posits that rising income inequality registers its effects on social mobility almost exclusively in the divide between the professional-managerial class and all other classes. We develop a two-factor model in which the foregoing effects of the inequality takeoff are set against the countervailing effects of the expansion of mass education. As the model implies, the trend in intergenerational association takes on a convex shape in the younger age groups, with the change appearing to accelerate in the most recent decade. These results suggest that the takeoff in income inequality may account in part for the decline in mobility.

This paper develops a dynamic model of neighborhood choice along with a com-putationally light multi-step estimator. The proposed empirical framework capturesobserved and unobserved preference heterogeneity across households and locations ina exible way. We estimate the model using a newly assembled data set that matchesdemographic information from mortgage applications to the universe of housing trans-actions in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1994 to 2004. The results provide therst estimates of the marginal willingness to pay for several non-marketed amenitiesneighborhood air pollution, violent crime, and racial compositionin a dynamic frame-work. Comparing these estimates with those from a static version of the model high-lights several important biases that arise when dynamic c onsiderations are ignored.

Are differences in the quality of workers prospects outside of their current employment relationship influential in generating pay differentials? We consider the role of an economys industrial structure in generating differences in outside prospects, and apply our analysis to the gender pay gap in the U.S. during the 1980-2010 period. We develop a formal search and matching model that connects outside prospects, industrial structure and wage gaps and use it to guide our subsequent empirical analysis of local labor markets. Our results suggest that an economys within-industry gender pay gapwhich also controls for human capital characteristicsis substantially influenced by gender differences in the quality of outside prospects generated by the economys industrial structure. Our analysis reveals that the relatively sharp narrowing of the gender pay gap during the 1980s is accounted for by the relatively sharp decline in the outside prospects of men during this period.