This article analyzes the labor integration of skilled Mexican immigrants in the United States. The analysis focuses on the volume and social-demographic characteristics of these immigrants and their labor integration into this country. From a comparative perspective, findings suggest that skilled Mexican immigrants residing in the United States, have lower english proficiency, a low percentage of those has post-graduate education and a mismatch between their university education and the specialized areas that have a high labor demand. On the other hand, their use of immigrant and non-immigrant visas is limited. As a result, the largest number of these skilled Mexican immigrants have a deficient labor integration because they have obtained occupations for which university education is not required.

This paper examines the impact of social heterogeneity on in-kind redistribution. We contribute to the previous literature in two ways: we consider (i) the provision of several public goods and (ii) agents different not only in income, but also in their preferences over the various goods provided by the public sector. In this setting, both the distribution and size of goods provision depend on the heterogeneity of preferences. Our main result is that preference heterogeneity tends to decrease in-kind redistribution, while income inequality tends to increase it. An empirical investigation based on United States Census Bureau data confirms these theoretical findings.

A new method to calculate lightning fatality risk is presented in order to develop a way to identify the lightning risk in areas where lightning fatality data are not available. This new method uses GIS software to multiply lightning flash density and population density on a grid and display the results on a map. A comparison to the known lightning fatality data was done to verify the method. The method works well with a quadratic regression correlation coefficient as high as 0.864, although a hybrid quadratic/log-linear regression is preferred for various reasons despite having a slightly lower correlation coefficient (0.827). Given the good performance, the lightning fatality risk method may be useful for developing countries, where lightning fatality reports may not be reliable, to help guide where to allocate scarce resources for lightning safety initiatives.

Among the regions residents, Pittsburghs African American men have historically and disproportionately faced unprecedented barriers to economic opportunities. This study, supported by The Heinz Endowments, focuses on structural barriers that contribute to persistent racial disparities in the Pittsburgh region. Structural barriers are obstacles that collectively affect a group disproportionately and perpetuate or maintain stark disparities in outcomes. Structural barriers can be policies, practices, and other norms that favor an advantaged group while systematically disadvantaging a marginalized group. A community touched by race-based structural barriers can be identified by the racial and economic stratification of its residents; Pittsburgh, like many large cities in the United States, fits that description.

This article surveys selected theories of urban growth and decline, from an American shrinking cities perspective, on the backdrop of three key themes. First, urban change is context-dependent. Second, urban (de)growth processes are multiscalar. And third, growth and shrinkage are not part of a dichotomy but are different realizations of similar underlying processes. Because the relationships between globalization and regional- and city-level urban restructuring tendencies are relatively established in the shrinking cities literature, the present article focuses primarily on sublocal theoretical approaches. This is intended to uncover insights about the mechanisms and bottom-up constraints that influence the direction of urban change. The review leads to a proposed framework for understanding how urban neighborhoods (do not) respond to internal or external pressures to change. Notably, the framework is partially derived from efforts that seek to re-ground the study of urban change in evolutionary theory, which in some ways represents a theoretical turn back toward the earliest (ecological) school of thought on urban decline. However, while earlier evolutionary approaches were acontextual and deterministic, the proposed framework emphasizes that analyzing urban change demands attention to multiple spatial scales and location-specific features, particularly the distribution of social capital within a city.

Market potential is one of the critical risks that investors consider when investing in a new venture. An entrepreneur must exercise care when estimating and justifying the addressable market size of a new p roduct. Low-cost market research techniques can be employed to validate the market size and customer demand. Two methods are provided to estimate the addressable market size, namely, the market factor method and the market buildup method. Demand drivers can be used to estimate the segment market size when using the market buildup method. The market maturity level is critical in determining the key challenges and competitive threats. The Bass Model can forecast the demand when introducing a new product category, when historical market data are not available, or the test market results are not reliable. A startup should make its sales and revenue projections based on the revenue drivers and its sales capabilities.

Gains in 20th century real wages and reductions in the black-white wage gap have been linked to the midcentury ascent of school quality. With a new data set uniquely appropriate to identifying the impact of female voter enfranchisement on education spending, we attribute up to one-third of the 1920–40 rise in public school expenditures to the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet the continued disenfranchisement of black Southerners meant white school gains far outpaced those for blacks. As a result, women’s suffrage exacerbated racial inequality in education expenditures and substantially delayed relative gains in black human capital observed later in the century.

River of traffic: the spatial fragmentation of US ports, Regional Studies. Containerization has spatially fragmented the physical functions of US ports by reducing the friction of moving freight through ports to inland destinations. Previous studies of this shift have focused on case studies or selected municipalities. Employing descriptive statistics, regression analysis and geographical information system (GIS) mapping to explore shifts in longshoring, warehousing and trucking employment across the United States, this paper provides two major findings. First, employment in labour-intensive transportation activities, notably warehousing and trucking, is primarily driven by proximity to population concentrations rather than to port infrastructure. Second, a significant proportion of warehousing employment has migrated, forming a band approximately 200–300 kilometres inland.

This paper examines the role of state fair employment laws in determining the destination choices of black migrants in the latter phase of the Great Migration. Although the timeframe of state-level fair employment enactment (1945-63) aligns well with that of the second migration (1940-70), there has not yet been an attempt to empirically examine the extent to which the laws attracted or deterred migrants. Using state-level data from the US Census and individual-level data from IPUMS USA samples for years 1940-70, I run a difference-in-difference-in-difference model to estimate the relationship between various measures of fair employment legislation and short-term and lifetime interstate migration for black and white men. I find that passage of fair employment legislation was the most effective at attracting black migrants in the middle of the period (roughly 1955-60), while passage decreased in deterministic power in the later years. In general, the earliest laws were not independently attractive at all, except when the sample is limited to the non-South. I find no evidence that older laws were more attractive than more recent laws -- for the period roughly 1955-1965, the existence of the legislation itself was sufficient to attract black migration.

Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (“HECMs”) implicitly bundle nondefaultable credit lines with put options that let borrowers, or their heirs, sell mortgaged homes for the credit line limit when borrowers move or die. The put option's value, net of closing costs, bounds HECM's value to borrowers below. Older homeowners' weak demand is commonly attributed to HECM's “high costs,” and the government prices insurance intending to avoid subsidy. However, simulations indicate put value has often exceeded closing costs, even ignoring other embedded options and using backward-looking expectations near the recent price-cycle peak. These results make weak demand more puzzling.

Our labor market measures usually assume continuous employment. Measures of turnover and tenure assume that a job starts, then the worker is continuously employed until the job ends. While historians have discussed irregular attendance (Greenlees 2007; Hareven 1982), economists have paid little attention to the time when workers were employed but not at work, though such absences clearly affect the number of hours actually worked. Ignoring worker absences could cause us to mis-measure annual hours of work. Atack and Bateman (1992) conclude that the typical hours of work in US manufacturing was 10 hours in 1880.

The Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) was designed to promote the development of low-birth weight (up to 2,500 grams) and premature (up to 37 weeks gestational age) infants. There is evidence that the IHDP intervention, a randomly-assigned bundle of services including primarily free, high-quality child care from 12 to 36 months, boosted cognitive and behavioral outcomes by the time participants at the end of the intervention. The literature has established that the intervention was more effective among the subsample of heavier low birth weight (2,000-2,500 grams) than among those born lighter. Among the heavier group, it was more effective for children from lower-income families. Families who participated in the intervention were diverse in key observable characteristics like income, race or ethnicity. In addition, families reallocated their time in different ways when then had the opportunity to use the free services provided by the IHDP. The goal of this paper is to understand the economic decisions and constraints faced by households who gained access to the IHDP and explain their differential behavior. In order to do so, we propose an economic model, construct measures of theoretically-relevant drivers of postnatal investment decisions, and explore patterns of heterogeneity in parental response and child development along these dimensions.

Progressive income taxes provide a disincentive for workers to live in high productivity local labor markets, potentially leading to a misallocation of resources across space. Under certain conditions on preferences, the optimal income tax is flat when there is only one type of worker. However, once the model is extended to include high and low-skill workers, we show that there are cases when the low-skill worker can actually be made worse off by moving from a progressive income tax to a flat tax. To quantitatively evaluate the merits of implementing a flat tax, we augment the empirical spatial equilibrium model in Diamond (2015) to incorporate federal income taxes and estimate it using Census data. Counterfactual simulations show that moving from the current tax schedule to a flat tax would increase the welfare of high-skill workers by 4.2%, while decreasing the welfare of low-skill workers by 3.8%. Our results provide a rationale for progressive taxes in assisting low-skill workers, even without redistribution.

Weather-related disasters and affiliated losses in the USA have amplified over time. However, prior research using normalization schemes on damage tallies suggests that weather hazard losses are not necessarily rising when inflation, changes in wealth, and growth in population are accounted. This study evaluates the latter factor, assessing if population changes and a sprawling development mode have led to increasing potential for tornado disasters in the USA. Specifically, this research shows where and how quickly tornado exposure is growing by appraising spatiotemporal trends in gridded population and housing unit data for five metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). The macroscale risk to tornadoes is represented by tornado day climatology and is related to the exposure of the five MSAs, which include Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Oklahoma City, OK; and St. Louis, MO. Supplementing the macroscale investigation, an observationally derived, hypothetical violent tornado track is transposed on various development types in each MSA to determine the microscale changes in human and built-environment exposure. Results demonstrate increased exposure in all MSAs at both the macro- and microscale. Of the five MSAs studied, Dallas, TX, had the greatest potential for a tornado disaster due to the higher risk for tornado occurrence comingling with the amount of MSA exposure. These results reveal further that amplifying exposure is a major impetus behind intensifying severe weather impacts and losses.

Since the 1980s, it has been widely assumed that increases in the minimum wage will increase women’s earnings relative to men’s earnings. The reasoning behind this theory is relatively straightforward: Women are more likely to have minimum wage jobs than men, and therefore are more likely to benefit from increases in the minimum wage. There is some evidence that such gender segregation is still the case—seeing as 59% of minimum wage workers are women (Economic Policy Institute 2021). Surprisingly, there has been relatively little research on this topic since the late 1990s. This dearth of research may in part be due to the fact the federal minimum wage has not changed in nominal terms in the United States since 2009. As a result, the theory on the effects of the minimum wage on the gender wage gap has gone largely unchallenged in recent years. Since that time, however, much has changed. In particular, the United States has experienced an unprecedented number of female college graduates—such that more women are enrolling in and graduating from college than men (Parker 2021). An increase in the number of female graduates, of course, should also mean fewer women working for minimum wage—and thus one would expect fewer women to be directly affected by increases in the minimum wage. While it is true that many women work at minimum wage level jobs, it is less than clear that the number of women who work for minimum wage jobs are sufficient to have a statistically significant impact on women’s earnings in general. There is good reason to be wary: A recent revisiting of the research on this topic has called into question the extent of the effects of the minimum wage on the gender wage gap, finding that the minimum wage has a much smaller effect on the gender wage gap than was previously thought (Autor, Manning, and Smith 2016; hereafter ‘Autor et al’). All of this undermines the longstanding theory that increases in the minimum wage predominately affect women’s earnings. Of course, the question of the gender wage gap in general is the most discussed topic in feminine economics. A plethora of solutions have been offered as to how to reduce the gender wage gap, most notably by Blau and Kahn (2017). Having considered all of these, however, all have been forced to acknowledge that a sizeable amount of the gender wage gap cannot be explained by any single factor (Blau and Kahn 2017). The number of unobservable characteristics—including sex discrimination—which are difficult to control for in a standard regression, make the task of determining which factors most affect the gender wage gap. While the gender wage gap in general receives a considerable bit of attention, the question of the effect of the minimum wage in particular on the gender wage gap has gone overlooked. Thus, the hope of this paper—at least in part—is to fill a void in the literature, and to reopen a case which, since the late 1990s, has largely gone cold, particularly in the United States.

This report examines trends in childhood poverty in New York City between 1990 and 2010, using data on poverty rates from the U.S. Census Bureau. In this report, children are defined as those people 14 years of age and under. The data indicate three key trends. First, the rate of childhood poverty in New York City was substantially higher than the national childhood poverty rate in 1990, 2000, and 2010. Second, the Citys childhood poverty rate did not change over the twenty year period considered here. Third, Latinos had the highest childhood poverty rate among the Citys major race/ethnic groups in all three census years. This report explores the Citys childhood poverty rates by sex, race/ethnicity, and nativity, among the five largest Latino national subgroups in New York City, and within the Citys five boroughs.

Mexican and Central American immigrants, who have long histories of migration to the United States, represent 37 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population, yet are disproportionately represented (71 percent) among the total unauthorized immigrant population. Mexico alone accounts for more than half of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, with another 15 percent and 14 percent from Central America and Asia, respectively. This report describes trends in the origins of the unauthorized population since 1990, offering estimates for top states and counties of residence by country or region of origin. It also provides estimates for how many members of each origin group are potentially eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, finding application rates vary significantly across national origins. The report also reviews how settlement patterns vary by origin among new and more established immigration destinations.

Previous findings on gene × environment interactions on externalizing behaviors have been inconsistent. In an attempt to provide clarity on this inconsistency, our study used two longitudinal population-based samples of young twins to examine the independent effects of two moderators commonly studied in the externalizing literature. Our first sample, the twin subsample from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), was composed of approximately 600 twin pairs measured on externalizing at ages 4 and 5. We tested for gene × parental emotional support and gene × socioeconomic status interactions on externalizing. Results indicated stronger genetic influences on externalizing at higher levels of parental emotional support but also at lower levels of socioeconomic status. These moderation effects, however, were not replicated in our analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Supplement (C-NLSY) data, which contained 2370 pairs of siblings measured on . . .