In 2014 there were more than 14 million refugees worldwide and almost a million places for permanent resettlement were needed. This article reviews administrative and survey data on the characteristics and integration outcomes of refugees resettled in the United States, Canada and Scandinavia. Refugees to these destinations are increasingly diverse in their origins and languages-posing challenges for host communities. Refugees in the United States tend to be employed due to an early focus on self-sufficiency there, but those in Sweden and Norway have low employment rates, with Canada representing a middle ground. While limited English skills slow integration in the United States and Canada, acquiring Norwegian and Swedish is tougher because refugees are seldom exposed to these languages before resettlement. In the United States, older refugee cohorts have reached income parity with the U.S.-born population, but those resettled since the 2008-09 recession have started at a greater employment and income disadvantage. This article describes the administrative and survey data on U.S. refugees in rich detail, but the available administrative data for refugees in Canada, Norway and Sweden have yet to be fully mined.

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (USBLS) (2012), the library profession has seen a 48% (19,458) increase in males working in libraries since 1980 and the male influx is expected to increase (Minnesota, 2011) despite lingering professional stereotypes. Movies, books, and other popular media focus on the overall image of the librarian, as if only one type exists for both sexes (Duke, 1999 Garcia, 2011). These stereotypes may be misinterpreted on the faulty premise that men confront the same stereotypes in the library workplace as women. Social roles and norms are different for men and women and men joining a traditionally feminine profession face different levels of prejudice than do women (Williams, 1991). Society sees librarianship as womens work, and anyone associated with it must be female or feminine. Men in nontraditional professions such as nursing and librarianship have become easy targets for stereotyping, creating a vicious cycle. Men assume the stereotypes are valid, they avoid taking the jobs, and the profession continues to see fewer males entering the workforce, creating a selffulfilling prophecy of low employment rates.

This paper addresses two questions: do socioeconomic status and family circumstance mediate the adverse effects of childhood lead exposure, and if so, why? Although these questions might seem better suited to a public health literature, understanding how early-life conditions mitigate or worsen the adverse consequences of environmental insults has important economic implications.

Subpopulations have variable connections to specific institutions, such as the military, which can influence their use of social programs and access to resources. We use data from the 5-year (20082012) American Community Survey (ACS) public-use file to examine current Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) use by military service status: active-duty personnel, recent veterans, long-term veterans, and reserve/guard members. Overall and by military service status, we estimate weighted descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression models that include demographic and socioeconomic controls. We document low but non-trivial levels of participation among active-duty personnel (2.2 %), higher but still moderate levels of SNAP use among veterans (7.1 % for recent veterans and 6.5 % for long-term veterans), and the highest level of use among members of the reserve/guard (9.0 %). Multivariate analyses support hypotheses based on the potential for the military, as a total institution, to substantially reduce use of SNAP among active-duty personnel, while veterans and reservists, who are more distal from food-related institutional resources, have higher likelihoods of using SNAP. Although levels of SNAP use among active-duty personnel, veterans, and reservists are lower than those observed in the national population, which includes those with no direct connection to military institutions, findings suggest that leaving active-duty military service results in a substantial and relatively immediate reduction in food-related resources for many recent veterans and their families. We discuss the implications of the findings for policy, limitations of the research, and directions for future research.

In this report, Voices for Utah Children presents data exploring the gender gap as well as the opportunity that it presents to advance Utah's economy and the success of all Utah's families and children. In Utah, women earn $0.70 for every dollar men earn; the national figure, in comparison, is $0.792. Women nationally need to get a Bachelor's degree to earn as much as the average man, but women in Utah need a Master's degree to achieve that same level of income. If Utah's wage gap were no larger than the nation's, the mathematical difference amounts to an additional $1.6 billion in personal income added to Utah's economy each year. The national wage gap between men and women is on track to close by 2047, but in Utah not until 2087.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration to ensure an existence worthy of human dignity. However, for many low-wage tipped workers in the U.S. restaurant industry these standards are out of reach. Rooted in exploitation of workers, the custom of tipping has evolved since its origins in the late Nineteenth Century. It has become codified in a two-tiered minimum wage system that denies tipped restaurant workers fair wages and basic labor protections. This report sheds light on the ways in which federal and state laws maintain this wage structure and enable working conditions in the restaurant industry that violate fundamental human rights protections for tipped workers, particularly women and people of color. This human rights analysis points to significant human rights deprivations and the need for new laws and policies.

Underground coal mining is a dangerous industry where the regulatory state may impose tradeoffs between productivity and safety. We recover the marginal tradeoffs using disasters near a mine as shocks that increase future accident costs. We find that in the second year after a disaster, productivity decreases 11% and accident rates decrease 18-80% for mines in the same state, with some evidence that the number of managers increases. Using published “value of statistical life” and injury cost estimates, we find that the productivity loss following a disaster in the same state costs 2.51 times the value of the safety increases.

This paper examines the relationship between parents’ access to family planning and the economic resources of the average child. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.5% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 11% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. Even with extreme assumptions about selection, these estimates are large enough to imply that family planning programs directly increased children’s resources, including increases in mothers’ paid work and increased childbearing within marriage.

This paper considers the normative implications of technical change for tax policy design. A task-to-talent assignment model of the labor market is embedded into an optimal tax problem. Technical change modifies equilibrium wage growth across talents and the substitutability of talents across tasks. The overall optimal policy response is to reduce marginal income taxes on low to middle incomes, while raising those on middle to high incomes. The reform favors those in the middle of the income distribution, reducing their average taxes while lowering transfers to those at the bottom.

The purpose of this study is to understand the process through which Black male collegians make decisions about their intended career choice. That is, what actors, factors, or conditions shape their within-college career-related decisions (e.g., major choice, out-of-class involvement) that influence their career path/choice? The main research questions that this study addressed: 1. What do Black male collegians report as important influences on their intended career choice? 2. How do these important influences shape Black male collegians career-related decisions in college? Black male collegians at three public universities in a Midwestern state participated in this study. Information was collected through a demographic form and a semi-structured interview. Grounded theory methods were used to guide data collection and analysis. Trustworthiness of the data collected was ensured through multiple methods of data collection, member checking, and use of a research partner to limit potential bias as a result of my experiences and perspectives that relate to this study. Findings from this study suggest that major influences of Black male collegians on their career choice include family, peers, role models, and career-related activities from early childhood through college. These influences had a major impact on how students approached decisions about their academic major and career choices during their time in college. Students that reported a high level of pre-collegiate career-related experiences, in contrast to their peers, were less likely to change their academic major, provided more specific details about the type of career they desire and plan to obtain it. These students were also more involved in career-related activities in college (ex: internships, research and student organization related career choice). In addition, students with a low level of pre-collegiate career-related experiences were able to compensate for their lack of career exploration through involvement in extracurricular activities in college related to vocational development. Last, Black male collegians reported that involvement in career-related extracurricular activities either provided insight into new career options or validated current career goals. This study illustrates how instrumental pre-collegiate career-related experiences are in the career choice decisions of Black male collegians. Students in this study that had career-related experiences throughout their pre-collegiate years had a higher level of career decision-making self-efficacy in college. This finding demonstrates the connectedness between pre-collegiate and higher educational experiences. Further research on career-related experiences of Black male collegians is needed to inform effective practices throughout the spectrum of education.

In this article, we examine whether new governance reforms in public sector work over the last two decades have generated managerial wage losses for African Americans and Latinos. Findings from Integrated Public Use Micro-Series data across three time points indicate that the new business logic encompassing, most notably, increased employer discretion has progressively disadvantaged African American and Latino men and women relative to their White and gender counterparts. Indeed, for both African Americans and Latinos in the managerial ranks, relative parity in wages that were witnessed in the public sector progressively eroded between 2000 and 2010. Qualifications to these findings indicate that levels of inequality become pronounced for African Americans, and more so among men than women. We discuss the historical niche status of public sector work for racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. and the importance of conducting further analyses of the public sector because of its fluid nature as a locus of racial stratification.

Adult attainment projects (AAP) consist of a series of traditional adult statuses: labor force participation, residential independence, marriage, parenthood, and homeownership. This article examines these status indicators as integral parts of an individualized attainment project that is best assessed later in adulthood. Close examination of AAP gives novel insights into the changing U.S. opportunity structure that go beyond what can be achieved through studying temporal patterns of adult status indicators independently. From 1980 to 2010, rates of completed AAP declined by double digits, and the difference in the odds of completing AAP between men on different ends of the income distribution doubled. There are structural and cultural explanations for these trends. Divergence hypotheses favor structural explanations involving social stratification processes. Convergence hypotheses favor cultural explanations based on the loosening of norms regarding traditional adult statuses. This article uses factor analytic models on data from the Current Population Survey, in conjunction with formal measurement invariance testing, to evaluate these hypotheses. The . . .

Iron deficiency reduces productive capacity in adults and impairs cognitive development in children. In 1943, the United States government required the fortification of bread with iron to reduce iron deficiency in the working-age population during World War II. This nationwide fortification of grain products increased per capita consumption of iron by 16 percent. I find that areas with lower levels of iron consumption prior to the mandate experienced greater increases in income and school enrollment in the 1940s. A long-term followup suggests that adults in 1970 with more exposure to fortification during childhood earned higher wages.

Social science accounts have only recently begun to recognize new governance shifts, including, but not limited to, privatization occurring in public sector institutions (e.g., education, prisons, the military) and in the functioning of federal and state sector jobs. This article, which presents unique analyses of wages across time using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and retested on similarly representative data from the Integrated Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS) and the American Community Survey (ACS), examines the extent to which these changes have generated significant inequalities for African Americans relative to whites. Most important, our results show that the relative racial parity in wages that once existed in public sector employment has eroded in the face of new governance, and racial inequalities for both men and women have intensified. Supplementary and decomposition analyses further highlight the potential escalation of discrimination as a core mechanism under new governance. Along with discussing the short- and long-term implications, we conclude by suggesting an important corrective to stratification scholarshipa corrective that highlights what structural transformation may mean for inequality and that recognizes important shifts that have made the public sector, much like the private sector, a locus of contemporary racial disadvantage.

Large private firms are still relatively rare in low-income countries, and we know little about how entry-level managers in these firms are selected. We examine a context in which nearly 80 percent of production line workers are female, but 95 percent of supervisors are male. We evaluate the effectiveness of female supervisors by implementing a training program for selected production line workers. Prior to the training, we find that workers at all level of the factory believe males are more effective supervisors than females. Careful skills diagnostics indicate that those perceptions do not always match reality. When the trainees are deployed in supervisory roles, production line workers initially judge females to be significantly less effective, and there is some evidence that the lines on which they work underperform. But after around four months of exposure, both perceptions and performance of female supervisors catch up to those of males. We document evidence that the exposure to female supervisors changes the expectations of male production workers with regard to promotion and expected tenure in the factory.

This paper documents that economy-wide declines in interest rates cause middle-income home-owners to experience large gains in housing wealth, while high-income and low-income home-owners experience no gains. Using a novel identification strategy that estimates latent demand for small neighborhoods and exploits minor incidental differences in the distribution of the metropolitan population of renters, I show that a 1.2% decline in mortgage interest rates leads to an average increase of 6% to 7% in housing wealth for middle-income homeowners, which translates to an average monetary increase of $7,600 to $8,900. The decline in interest rates shifts the housing demand schedule of household renters, which in turn causes an increase in house prices in neighborhoods where middle-income homeowners live.

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the college enrollment of U.S. natives. Many studies have focused on the effect of increased demand for schooling by immigrants on the enrollment of natives. However, changes in immigrant labor supply may also affect native enrollment by changing local market prices. Using U.S. Census data from 1970 to 2000, I find that state-level increases in the number of immigrant college students do not significantly lower the enrollment rates of U.S. natives. On the contrary, state-level increases in the ratio of unskilled immigrant workers to skilled immigrant workers significantly raise native enrollment rates. These findings suggest that the demand for college is sensitive to wage rates and that college slots are flexibly supplied over a decadal time horizon.

We examine the relative labor market gains experienced by first-time college students who enrolled in five community colleges in Michigan in 2003 and 2004. We track credentials, credits, earnings, and employment for these students through 2011. We compare labor market outcomes of those who earned a credential (associate degree or certificate) to those who enrolled but did not earn a credential. The data sources consist of administrative records data from the colleges, Unemployment Insurance earnings data from the State of Michigan, and enrollment and graduation data from the National Student Clearinghouse. Our analytic sample consists of 20,581 students. We find that students who were awarded a long-term certificate (referred to as a diploma in some states, including North Carolina) earned $2,500 to $3,600 more per year than did those without a credential, with the larger returns concentrated among men. For associate degrees, the estimated returns were $9,400 for women and $5,600 for men. Women saw little gain when awarded a short-term certificate, while men gained $5,200 per year. Estimated returns were highest in health-related and technical fields.