The potential consequences of granting amnesty to some or all of the estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. today are a source of great controversy. We attempt to inform this debate by estimating the impacts of the last major U.S. amnesty – through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) – on income tax contributions and participation. Our empirical approach exploits both the timing of IRCA and the geographic unevenness of applications for temporary legal status under the law, and our analysis focuses on California, which was home to a majority of applicants. Using a newly constructed county-level panel of highly-detailed income tax statistics, we find that counties with more amnesty applicants per capita saw relatively large increases in per-capita income tax returns filed starting in 1986. Consistent with applicant demographics, the increases in filing rates were concentrated among low-income filers and were accompanied by increased claims of California’s renter’s tax credit and increases in per-capita federal transfers under the EITC.

The ratio of skilled (college graduate) to unskilled (non-college graduate) workers (the skill intensity ratio, SIR) varies substantially across cities and the variance in the SIR has increased significantly since 1970. Recent research finds that the ratio of skilled to unskilled worker earnings (the skilled wage ratio, SWR) also varies significantly. The income elasticity hypothesis (IEH) holds that if, as empirical evidence suggests, the income elasticity of demand for housing is significantly below unity, then the SWR should vary inversely with house prices. This implication of the IEH has been confirmed in empirical tests and leads to a further consequence of the IEH. If the SWR varies inversely with house prices, the SIR should vary directly as employers substitute more skilled workers when the SWR falls. This provides the opportunity for a new test of the IEH which is conducted here. The results strongly confirm, consistent with the IEH, that housing cost is an important determinant of variation in the SIR across cities.

In the past decades, elimination of the pay-as-you-go system in U.S. has been extensively discussed and studied. Such an elimination would also eliminate the intragenerational redistribution done by the following policies of social security. Due to spousal and survivor׳s benefit provisions, US Social Security system redistributes (mostly) to single-earner married households. Since retirement benefits are a concave function of past mean earnings, the system redistributes from high earners to low earners. Finally, existence of a cap on social security taxable earnings makes the system regressive. This paper quantifies redistributive, labor supply, and welfare implications of these policies using a general equilibrium life-cycle model. Agents start out as permanently married or single and with education levels and wage profiles, where the latter depend both on education and gender. The household is the decision maker and decides on labor supply of its member(s) and saving. Elimination of these policies results in a 5.5% rise in labor force participation of married females, while increasing aggregate welfare by 0.4%. A majority of households experience positive gains in welfare. Single-earner married households incur large welfare losses (as big as 1.1%), whereas two-earner households with high skilled spouses experience substantial welfare gains (as big as 1.9%).

Despite emerging evidence on racial disparities in other quality outcomes, we know little about racial differences in QOL for older adults. This presentation examines racial/ethnic differences in QOL for 1) community-dwelling and 2) institutionalized older adults. We used two sources of data: 1) The Integrated Health Interview Series, which includes a nationally-representative sample of non-institutionalized adults aged 65 and older who completed a Quality of Life Supplement (n=4,815 in 2010). 2) Resident QOL survey from Minnesota, linked to the Minimum Dataset and facility characteristics (N=10,929 in 2010). Findings show statistically significant racial differences in QOL both for community-dwelling and institutionalized older adults. Although most of the individual differences were explained by health status, facility racial composition remained a significant predictor of QOL even after adjusting for health status and other covariates among institutionalized older adults. Findings show the importance of examining structural characteristics and practices beyond individual differences.

Health insurance benefit mandates are believed to have adverse effects on the labor market, but efforts to document such effects for mental health parity mandates have had limited success. I show that one reason for this failure is that the association between parity mandates and labor market outcomes vary with mental distress. Accounting for this heterogeneity, I find adverse labor market effects for non-distressed individuals, but favorable effects for moderately distressed individuals and individuals with a moderately distressed family member. On net, I conclude that the mandates are welfare increasing for moderately distressed workers and their families, but may be welfare decreasing for non-distressed individuals.

The recognition of the importance of the level of human capital to the successful functioning of societies has led to an increased focus among states and communities on the skill and educational composition of their populations and to consideration of steps that might enhance the proportion of more highly trained people. Often, however, policies and programs are developed without due recognition of the population dynamics which account for the current levels or of the multiple pathways involved. In this analysis, we decompose the college educated proportion of the population of each state to reveal the relative role of production and retention of the native born, in-migration from other states, and immigrants from abroad. States differ quite widely on these components and a states recognition of its relative position can be helpful in developing the most effective policies. The resultsfor each state are derived from an analysis of lifetime migration embedded in the AmericanCommunity Survey (ACS) data for 2006-2010.

This paper provides estimates of those who are potentially eligible for DAPA and DACA. However, it also looks beyond DAPA and DACA to make the case for broad legislative reform in light of long-term trends in unauthorized migration to the United States and the unauthorized resident population. In particular, it argues that substantial declines in the unauthorized population—a goal shared by partisans on both sides of the immigration debate—will require reform of the legal immigration system, legalization of a substantial percentage of the unauthorized, and a more effective response to nonimmigrant visa overstays.

Proper analysis of skilled migration flows and their impact requires joint identification of where migrants were born, educated, and when they moved to the destination country. To highlight these issues and identify key patterns in career paths, we focus here on doctors practicing in the United States who were born and/or trained in Africa. We overcome data constraints by merging data from the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Community Survey (ACS) via propensity score matching techniques. Our results show that the standard assumptions on skilled migration lead to considerable overestimation of its extent and hide several economically important migration patterns. We find that almost half of African-born doctors were trained outside their country of birth. On the flip side, around 15 percent of all doctors trained in Africa were actually born outside the continent. There is significant variation across countries in terms of age of migration levels, implying that many African doctors migrate after years of service and that their human capital is not completely lost to their birth countries. In short, global labor and education markets for high-skilled professionals are integrated in more nuanced and thought-provoking ways than assumed in the literature.

The paper reports that 8.6 million US residents were eligible to naturalize in 2013. This figure approximates the 8.8 million estimate of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Mexican nationals constitute the largest naturalization-eligible population at 2.7 million, followed by Indian (337,000), Chinese (320,000), Cuban (316,000), and Canadian (313,000) nationals. Fifty countries have 25,000 or more naturalizationeligible persons. The large number of legally resident Mexican nationals and this population’s high naturalization eligibility rate mean that US states with large Mexican populations have relatively high percentages of legal foreign-born residents who can naturalize. The overall “naturalization eligibility” rate was 31 percent in 2013, including 48 percent for Mexican nationals. Nine of the 25 largest US naturalizationeligible populations by source country have naturalization eligibility rates in excess of 40 percent, including Mexico (48 percent), Canada (45 percent), El Salvador (42 percent), the United Kingdom (41 percent), Guatemala (44 percent), Japan (56 percent), Honduras (48 percent), and Brazil (41 percent). On a state level, California, Texas, New York, and Florida contain roughly five million of the US naturalization-eligible or about 58 percent of the total population. The paper finds that a large number of naturalization-eligible immigrants may have difficulty meeting the naturalization requirements or may need intensive support to do so. This population likely includes substantial percentages of the 2.87 million naturalization-eligible who have lived in the United States for more than 25 years; 1.16 million who do not speak English; 3.0 million with less than a high school education; and the 1.8 million with incomes below the poverty level. On the other hand, high percentages of eligible immigrants would seem to be well-situated to naturalize, including those who have lived in the United States for more than 10 years (78 percent); are age 35 or older (74 percent); are married (64 percent); speak English well, very well, or only English (65 percent); have access to both a computer and the internet (74 percent); earn income above the poverty level (79 percent); and have health insurance (72 percent).

The sharp drop in equity values that occurred at the beginning of the recent financial and economic crisis led to widespread concern about the effect of the crisis on retirement security. Between July 2007 and March 2009, the S&P 500 Index monthly average value fell by 50 percent.2 With defined contribution (DC) pension plans largely having replaced defined benefit (DB) plans for US workers (Poterba, Venti and Wise 2007), millions of workers experienced deep declines in the value of their retirement savings as a result of the crisis. It was widely predicted that workers would need to delay retirement in order to make up for these losses, with many newspaper headlines such as “Economic Crisis Scrambles Retirement Math” and “Will You Retire? New Economic Realities Keep More . . .

A Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) is a way to create a time-variable spatial representation of geographic features, which is considered as a bridging technology between geography and history in a digital framework. The history of Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia covers several thousand years, with numerous sites representing important historical landmarks. As Makkah is the most important city in Islamic history, developing a HGIS for it would have significant meaning for the more than a billion Muslims around the world. A state-of-the-art HGIS has been developed for Makkah through acquiring, integrating, manipulating, and analyzing an extensive collection of spatial and non-spatial datasets. This research has resulted in the publishing of a bi-lingual atlas of historical sites in Makkah that contains more than seventy historical locations and covers almost a thousand years (500s to 1500s). Work is underway to also build an online HGIS on the Harvard WorldMap platform, so that materials in the atlas and beyond will be made available for researchers and the general public from any part of the world through a web-based dynamic mapping site. Future work may propel the system into an augmented reality innovation. This paper introduces the background and historical-geographic materials, summarizes the technical challenges and solutions, and presents milestones and perspectives for this on-going effort.

The debate over urban sprawl and its impacts is overarching and closely linked to voluntary or induced resettlement of population from the inner city or from other urban or rural settlements to the urban periphery. Residential preference drive of urban sprawl could diverse in post-socialist countries from a typical suburbanization process in the West. According to different age and income structure, people may look for the same amenities in their preferred type of neighborhood, yet the diversity of motives and the ability to fulfill the key aspirations explain a drive towards inner or peripheral city development. In this paper, a suburban case-study neighborhood in Belgrade metropolitan area was analyzed in terms of variability and continuity of residential preferences. Questionnaire survey has been conducted for obtaining the results on motives that drive people to settle in a suburban neighborhood, their sat

The shift away from school desegregation policies toward market-based reforms necessitates a deeper understanding of the social and institutional forces driving contemporary school segregation. The author conceptualizes school segregation as a mode of monopolistic closure amid status competition, where racial/ethnic groups compete for school-based status and resources. He tests the theory by analyzing primary and secondary school segregation throughout the United States from 1993 to 2010. Findings support the hypotheses that segregation increases with the salience of race/ethnicity and the decentralization of school systems, which fuels differentiation and provides incentives and opportunities to monopolize schools. Parallel findings for black-white, Hispanic-white, and black-Hispanic segregation suggest that a core set of processes drives school segregation as a general phenomenon.

As both older and newer immigrant gateway metropolitan areas grow more racially diverse, scholars of neighborhood change want to know whether these areas are also becoming more residentially integrated. While it is logically and mathematically plausible to assume that increasing racial diversity directly leads to increased racial residential integration, this paper argues that the empirical reality may actually be the opposite. To investigate this concept, we use statistical and cartographic methods to analyze tract-level Census data of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, a case study that is both representative and unique. Results indicate that increasing racial diversity in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area between 1990 and 2010 coincided with increased racial residential segregation. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings and make recommendations for future research.

Until the mid-1980s, estimates of the undocumented immigrant population were purely speculative and widely divergent.[1] Since then, new demographic techniques have reduced the range of uncertainty about the size of the population and its rate of growth. As a result, unsupported speculation about these numbers has been rare in recent years. A glaring exception is Donald Trump’s assertion on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on July 24: “I am now hearing it’s 30 million, it could be 34 million, which is a much bigger problem.” This report debunks that hearsay.

This survey is an integrated view of other surveys on privacy preserving for data integration. First, we review the database context and challenges and research questions. Second, we formu- late the privacy problems for schema matching and data matching. Next, we introduce the elements of privacy models. Then, we sum- marize the existing privacy techniques and the analysis (proofs) of privacy guarantees. Finally, we describe the privacy frameworks and their applications.

This technical report documents the individual level data preparation of burial and baptismal registers of the church books of St. James in the Hanseatic city of Rostock, Germany, in order to analyze infant mortality in the 19th century. In addition to describing the digitalized registries, data quality, and the construction of variables, this paper presents a new classification of occupations that is also applicable to other historical data sets. The merging of the baptismal and burial data into an event history data set is outlined exemplarily for the time period of 1815 to 1829. Th

This dissertation examines Black locational attainment in the post-Civil Rights era in three separate but related papers.