In this paper I study the effect of bilateral trade on the labor market value of human capital specific to the trade partner country. I use two trade liberalization episodes NAFTA and China's accession to the WTO to test how they affected outcomes of individuals endowed with Mexico- and China-specific human capital in the US. I find that both the wage and employment gap between ethnic Mexicans and other natives narrows as a consequence of the trade shock, but within group inequality increases as it is mostly high-skilled individuals who benefit from trade. Descendants from other Latin American countries are not found to be systematically affected by NAFTA, suggesting that it is inherently Mexico-specific traits that rise in value. Main conclusions hold when analyzing China's accession to the WTO. The results suggest that the `cultural capital' that immigrants bring with them to the host country becomes productive and valuable when the costs to trade between the source and host countries decrease.

The stock of human capital in an area is important for regional economic growth and development. However, highly educated workers are often quite mobile and there is a concern that public investments in college graduates may not benefit the state if the college graduates leave the state after finishing their education. This paper examines the relationship between the production of college graduates from a state and the stock of college graduates residing in the state using microdata from the decennial census and American Community Survey. I examine the relationship across states and across cohorts within states. The descriptive analysis suggests that the relationship between the production and stock of college graduates has increased over time and is nearly proportional in recent years. I also employ instrumental variables methods to estimate causal effects. The preferred IV results yield an average point estimate for the production-stock relationship of 0.52, but the effect likely decreases with age.

This paper assembles new evidence on some of the longer-term consequences of U.S. family planning policies, defined in this paper as those increasing legal or financial access to modern contraceptives. The analysis leverages two large policy changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s: first, the interaction of the birth control pill’s introduction with Comstock-era restrictions on the sale of contraceptives and the repeal of these laws after Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965; and second, the expansion of federal funding for local family planning programs from 1964 to 1973. Building on previous research that demonstrates both policies’ effects on fertility rates, I find suggestive evidence that individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later.

Is difficulty of purchasing health insurance as an individual or small business a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States? I answer this question by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate, which allowed many 19-25 year olds to acquire health insurance independently of their employment. This mandate provides a means to estimate the number of potential entrepreneurs discouraged by the current system of employer-based health insurance. A difference-in-difference strategy finds that the dependent coverage mandate led to a 13-24% increase in self-employment among the treated group. the effect is found to be larger for women and for unincorporated businesses. An instrumental variables strategy finds that those actually receiving health insurance coverage as dependents were much more likely to start businesses.

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

In this study, we use a combination of geographic information systems and Bourdieuan social theory to analyze the development of a food policy council in Birmingham, Alabama. The questions we investigate are: What is the relationship between race and culture? How is this relationship manifest in practice within the alternative food and agriculture movement? In our work, we show how the racially segregated conditions of metropolitan Birmingham forge divergent habitus among Blacks and Whites in the region. Consequently, Whites have difficulty producing practices and interpretations of those practices that Blacks can recognize as legitimate, and vice versa. As a result, the food policy council emerges from and remains trapped within a space of Whiteness, and few Blacks serve on the council or participate in its production.

Using two trade liberalization episodes, I examine how bilateral trade affects the labor market returns to country-specific cultural capital. In particular, I assess how NAFTA and Chinas entry into the WTO affected the labor market outcomes of workers with Mexican and Chinese backgrounds in the United States. I find that, when two countries engage in trade activity, the demand for individuals endowed with the cultural capital specific to the trading partner country increases, though this effect is highly heterogeneous in skill level. High-skilled Mexican descendants experience higher wage growth and occupational upgrading as an effect of NAFTA; they also move to industries most exposed to trade with Mexico after the implementation of the agreement. Similar results are found when analyzing the effect of Chinas trade liberalization on the workers of Chinese background. The effects of trade seems to be larger in non-border regions, where informational asymmetries are likely to be the strongest. Moreover, it mostly stems from US-born individuals, and the analysis of Central American descendants suggests that at least part of the effect of NAFTA is specific to Mexico. While language might be an important part of a countrys cultural capital, it does not explain the effect of trade alone, though evidence suggests that its role is more important in the case of China, when language barriers are more prevalent.

Economics has been shown to be a relatively high-earning college major, but geographic differences in earnings have been largely overlooked. The authors of this article use the American Community Survey to examine geographic differences in both absolute earnings and relative earnings for economics majors. They find that there are substantial geographic differences in both the absolute and relative earnings of economics majors, even when controlling for individual characteristics such as age, education, occupation, and industry. They argue that mean earnings in specific labor markets are a better measure of the benefits of majoring in economics than simply looking at national averages.

We explore the connection between inequality and civil conflict by focusing on the medi- ating role of ethnic identity. Using over 200 individual-level surveys from 89 countries, we provide a new data set with country- and group-level measures of inequality within and across ethnic groups. We then show that consistent with Esteban and Ray’s (2011) argument about the need for labor and capital to fight civil wars, there is a strong posi- tive association between the level of inequality within a group and the group’s propen- sity to engage in civil conflict. In addition, we find that countries with higher levels of inequality within ethnic groups are most likely to experience civil wars. By contrast, in- equality across ethnic groups is not associated with the civil conflict. By breaking down measures of inequality into group-level components, the analysis also reveals why it is difficult to identify a relationship between general inequality and conflict, and it high- lights more generally why it will often be difficult to draw substantive conclusions in cross-national research by relying on measures of overall inequality like the Gini.

Contrary to expectations, the likelihood of overeducation is shown to be inversely related to unemployment rates when not control for selectivity. Furthermore, incidence data show that overeducation is more common among men than women and among Whites than Blacks. At issue is selectivity: employment must be selected for overeducation to occur. When using bivariate probit with sample selection models, the likelihood of overeducation is found to be positively related to local unemployment rates, higher for women than men, higher for mothers of young children than other women, and lower for fathers than other males. Race, not speaking English very well, and having a disability are found to have a greater impact on the likelihood of overeducation than incidence data suggest.

Since the passage of the immigration and nationality act of 2965, the Korean population in the United States has grown more than twenty times. Over the last four decades, the population of Korean Americans, including . . .

This chapter presents a brief historical overview of labor and labor markets, using the United States as a case study. Topics include the concepts of the labor force and the labor market; sources of information for historical study; basic features of change over time in the size and composition of the labor force, hours worked, occupations, and skills; changes in real wages over time and in the structure of wages; the emergence of a national market for labor; and the evolution of racial differences.

The crowd-sourcing approach should be implemented into a new historical geoportal of Poland due to its increasing potential in WebGIS. Registered users will be able to acquire spatial data from various map series. As it requires feature class harmonization, a common symbol classification should be proposed. It will be based on chosen topographic maps of Polish land from the 19th and 20th centuries. Feature classes derived from archival maps will be standardized and reclassified, but with no information lost. This will be done in four steps which require: data acquisition, map content harmonization, feature class typification and attribute table elaboration. In addition, four methods of data harmonization can be distinguished: symbol sequence, semantic analogies, spatial relations and a combined method. The paper covers the elaboration of two thematic layers - roads and railways based on three topographic maps (Austrian 1:75 000, German 1:100 000, Russian 1: 126 000).

This paper sets out to clarify the characteristics of Irish immigrants in England & Wales and the United States in the late 19th century by comparing the family system of the Ireland-born immigrants to that of Britain-born and American-born citizens, and by examining the pull and push factors for Irish immigrants, from the perspective of the Hajinal's theory and family strategies. To verify this hypothesis, I used the 100% census data of 1881 (England & Wales) and the 1880 (the United States) in NAPP (North Atlantic Population Project) issued by the Minnesota Population Center to analyze the Irish immigrant families in England & Wales and the United States. In conclusion, the Irish-Britain and the Irish-American migrants, who had lived in extended family households or multiple family households in their home country, formed simple family households in England & Wales and the United States, their host country, assimilating themselves to England & Wales and the United States communities. The head and members of each household adopted a family strategy in which all family members should have jobs, to pursue their well-being. However they had their identity, for example the large number of children and their ethnic endogamy.

This paper documents that mortgage market deregulation helps mitigate the risk of population aging by affecting a foundational family-level decision: the choice to have children. Using a US federal regulator ruling, I show that young households fully exposed to mortgage market deregulation increase their probability of purchasing a home and having a child by six percentage points. Supplemental tests reject alternative hypotheses based on income or housing wealth growth and, instead, suggest that access to space is the relevant economic mechanism. Collectively, the evidence indicates that increased access to mortgage credit impacts the total number of children in the economy.

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher payment shocks experience significant increases in healthcare supply. On average, a 2 percent increase in payment rates leads to a 3 percent increase in care provision. Elective procedures such as cataract surgery respond much more strongly than less discretionary services. Non-radiologists expand their provision of MRIs, suggesting effects on technology adoption. We estimate economically small health impacts, albeit with limited precision.

Youth aging out of the foster care system are at high risk for adult arrests, but providing extended foster care support during the early years of their transition from adolescence to independent adulthood may reduce this risk. This study used survey data from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (N = 732) matched with official arrest data to estimate the potential benefit of providing extended foster care support in reducing the risk of arrest in the early transition period. In addition, other factors related to the risk of arrest for these former foster youth were explored. Event history modeling techniques were used to estimate the impact of extended care on the risk of a first adult arrest. Models were estimated for men and women separately, and for all non-procedural arrests and violent arrests only. Extended care is associated with a lower risk of arrest in the first year, but appears to have a declining effect over time.

The pattern of racial identification among Puerto Ricans is not uniform. It varies depending on where they live. Most identify as white, but more do so in Puerto Rico than in the USA. This paper addresses the impact that living alternatively in the USA and in Puerto Rico has on racial identification among Puerto Ricans. Using Public Use Microdata Sample data from the American Community Survey and the Puerto Rico Community Survey 2006-2008, I find that while there is no single pattern of impact, those more grounded on the islands racial system are more likely to identify aswhite in the USA, while those less grounded in Puerto Rico are more likely to identify as multiracial or by another racial descriptor. On their return to the island, they revert to the prevalent pattern of racial identification, while still exhibiting effects of their sojourn on their racial identity.