This paper examines the evolution of immigrant earnings in the United States between 1970 and 2010. There are cohort effects not only in wage levels, with more recent cohorts having lower entry wages through 1990, but also in the rate of wage growth, with more recent cohorts experiencing less economic assimilation. The slowdown in assimilation is partly related to a concurrent decline in the rate at which the new immigrants add to their human capital stock, as measured by English language proficiency. The data also suggest that the rate of economic assimilation is significantly lower for larger national origin groups.

This study examines the concentration of wealth in New York City between 1990 and 2010 using data on household income from the U.S. Census Bureau. It measures income-earning categories in two separate ways. First, by examining the percentile distribution of wealth that is the upper 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% of household income earners and the percentage of total wealth these households control, as well as all percentile categories in 10% intervals. Second, it examines households in different actual income categories, such as those earning over $100,000, and how much of the total Citys wealth they control. Additionally, the gini index or coefficient, and how it changed from 1990 to 2010, is used as an indicator of the process of wealth concentration in the City.

This dissertation examines the relationships between immigration and the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) disease and prevalence of TB infection in California and in the United States (U.S.). The majority of TB cases in California occur among foreign-born persons from countries with high TB burdens. Although the incidence of TB is declining, the decline among immigrants has stalled, and relationships of this trend with changes in immigration patterns are not well characterized. Census data suggest that immigration to California has undergone notable transitions since the 1990s that have shaped the volume, demographic and socioeconomic composition of immigration streams to the state. The first two papers of this dissertation explore the relationships between changes in immigration and the incidence of TB using the decomposition method, and an innovative application of cohort analysis. The third paper examines the only nationally representative survey of new immigrants in the U.S. to determine gaps in TB screening and to assess the prevalence and risk of latent TB infection (LTBI) in immigrant subgroups by country of origin. This unique data source allowed for the assessment of important immigration, health, and socioeconomic variables. The decomposition of the recent decline in the incidence of TB among the foreign-born in California shows that changes in the population composition associated with immigration shifts made a modest contribution to the decline, with the majority of the decline due to group-specific declines in rates. There was a notable difference between Hispanics/Latinos and Asians/Pacific Islanders, whereby the impact of immigration shifts was much greater in the former group. The cohort analysis shows that waves of immigration have had varying impacts on the incidence of TB in California, some cohorts contributing to increasing incidence, and others to decreasing incidence. This suggests that the slowing in the decline of the incidence of TB may be due, in part, to immigration cohort entry effects. Identifying cohorts with elevated risk of TB can help develop and test hypotheses on the epidemiologic reasons for the observed effects, and can provide an evidence base for selecting demographic subgroups in which to prioritize TB screening. The TB screening uptake and TB prevalence analysis confirmed gaps in testing for TB that varied significantly by country of origin. Substantial variation in the prevalence and risk of LTBI was also found, which may inform public health efforts to prioritize the targeted testing and treatment to specific subgroups of highest risk.

A partir de estimaciones de la Current Population Survey, en esta investigación se analizan las características demográfi cas, sociales y económicas de los adultos mayores migrantes mexicanos en Estados Unidos. Las estadísticas e indicadores muestran que en los cuatrienios analizados (1997-2000, 2001-2004, 2005-2008 y 2009-2012) este grupo se caracteriza por ser una población mayoritariamente femenina, tiene menos de diez grados de escolaridad, el estado civil que predomina es el casado y lo común es que se encuentre fuera de la fuerza laboral. En relación con la edad de ingreso a Estados Unidos, los datos indican que aproximadamente nueve de cada diez llegaron en las edades jóvenes.

The Brain Drain has been the subject of research and discussions since the 1950s. Most of the earlier studies on the subject emphasized the negative effects of the brain drain on the developing countries which were losing their intellectuals, high-skilled and talented people to the developed countries, especially Western Europe and USA. However, recent studies have indicated that the brain drain can also have positive effects on the development of both developing and developed countries. Information technology outsourcing created a market for some developing countries where their high skilled and talented people work for outsourcing companies with better wages and benefits without leaving their home country. These facts lead to the question on the effect of information technology outsourcing on the brain drain phenomenon. This paper aims to investigate the existence of a relationship between information technology outsourcing and the brain drain, and if found study whether IT outsourcing lead to a reduction or an increase in the brain drain issue.

Rural communities in the U.S. are struggling to survive and thrive as processes of deindustrialization and globalization lure youth away to urban areas. Meanwhile, young people who do reside in rural places struggle to negotiate the parts of their identity that are connected to place and their gender, race, and sexuality, which can often seem at odds with the norms of their community. Sociologists have shown that these societal patterns help create and reinforce economic, educational, and class-based inequalities among rural and urban places. Feminist theorists have developed the concept of intersectionality to better understand how the multiple identities that people embody can obscure the ways gender, race, sexuality, class, and other forms of identity contribute to inequalities. In my dissertation, I apply an intersectional approach to the experiences of young, college-educated people in rural places to understand if and how they are able to reconcile their identities in order to create a sense of belonging and how this affects their physical and social mobility and participation in their communities. I argue that sexism, racism, and heterosexism alienate young people from communities but that negotiating the intersections of identity . . .

Building on the idea that religious communities provides mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in the nineteenth-century United States and show that religious communities were larger in counties where they faced greater rainfall risk. The link between rainfall risk and the size of religious communities is stronger in counties that were more agricultural, that had lower population densities, or that were exposed to greater rainfall risk during the growing season.

]Relational top-N queries with both text attributes and numeric attributes are useful in many applications, by using the ranking functions based on both semantic distances for text attributes and numeric distances for numeric attributes. In this paper, we propose an approach for processing such type of top-N queries in relational databases. The basic idea of the approach is to create an index based on WordNet to expand the tuple words semantically for text attributes and on the related information of numeric attributes, meanwhile the size of the index increases linearly with the size of the database. The results of extensive experiments show that our method is efficient and effective.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY One of the most successful health policy measures enacted in the past few decades was the bipartisan Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), passed by Congress in 1997. CHIP is currently funded through federal Fiscal Year 2015, but Congress will soon have to decide if it will be funded after that point. This report focuses on differences between rural and urban children in terms of recent trends in health insurance coverage and type of health insurance. Data are examined for states, counties, and congressional districts.

There is still considerable dispute about the magnitude of labor supply elasticities. While differences in micro and macro estimates are recently attributed to frictions and adjustment costs, we show that relatively low labor supply elasticities derived from microeconometric models can also be explained by modeling assumptions with respect to wages. Specifically, we estimate 3,456 structural labor supply models each representing a plausible combination of frequently made choices. While most model assumptions do not systematically affect labor supply elasticities, our analysis shows that the results are very sensitive to the treatment of wages. In particular, the often-made but highly restrictive independence assumption between preferences and wages is key. To overcome this restriction, we propose a flexible estimation strategy that nests commonly used models. We show that loosening the exogeneity assumption leads to labor supply elasticities that are much higher.

There are many reasons why poverty matters, but it is especially troubling that it affects such fundamental outcomes as health and access to health care. If poverty did not bring about all manner of health risks, we would likely be somewhat less troubled by it. But of course poverty and other forms of social and economic disadvantage do often translate into deficits in health and health care. The purpose of this brief is to examine long-term trends in American health and health care. The purpose of this brief is to examine long-term trends in American health and to lay out the current state of evidence on the extent to which health and health care are unequally distributed. We also note how the recent economic downturn affected these trends and disparities.

Occupational segregation is a fundamental cause of structural inequality within the labor market, but it remains under-researched in the case of disability status. Using 2011 American Community Survey data for working-age adults, we examine the representation of persons with different types of disabilities across occupations and industries. We find that employed workers with disabilities experience occupational segregation that limits their earnings potential. People with disabilities tend to work in lower-skilled jobs with limited educational and experience requirements. However, these disparities also vary by the nature of a persons disability, which perpetuates inequality by disability status. Although supply-side, human capital variables play a role in shaping earnings, we find that these broader, structural factors and occupational characteristics strongly influence the economic wellbeing of people with disabilities.

This paper investigates how the geographic distribution of human capitalmeasured as college attainmentevolves over time. With U.S. data, I decompose generation-to-generation changes in local human capital into three factors: the previous generation's human capital, intergenerational transmission of skills from parents to their children, and migration of the children. I find significant persistence of local skills at the commuting zone (local labor market) level. Labor market size, climate, and local colleges affect local skill measures. Skills move from urban-to-rural labor markets through intergenerational transmission but from rural-to-urban labor markets through migration.

Despite the rising concern and the study of human trafficking for 20 years, few studies systematically analyze the phenomenon and almost none take a global, cross-national approach. Quantitative research is rare in this field: most studies cover just one or a few countries (JacKucharski 2012; Mahmoud and Trebesch 2009; Clawson et. al. 2006; Cho 2012; Karakus and Mcgarrell 2011; Danailova-Trainor and Belser 2006; Akee 2007). This study offers, firstly, a more rigorous examination of factors that explain anti-trafficking enforcement across the globe. Using external validity test of the sources of anti-trafficking enforcement I choose the best measurement for global anti-trafficking enforcement. Secondly, the study aims to offer a more rigorous examination of factors that explain antitrafficking enforcement across the globe. I expect to offer a broad theoretical framework according to which I test most significant factors influencing global anti-trafficking enforcement. Thirdly, with this study I expect to offer some recommendations to the policymakers responsible for construction of global measure of anti-trafficking enforcement

There is still considerable dispute about the magnitude of labor supply elasticities. While differences in micro and macro estimates are recently attributed to frictions and adjustment costs, we show that relatively low labor supply elasticities derived from microeconometric models can also be explained by modeling assumptions with respect to wages. Specifically, we estimate 3,456 structural labor supply models each representing a plausible combination of frequently made choices. While most model assumptions do not systematically affect labor supply elasticities, our analysis shows that the results are very sensitive to the treatment of wages. In particular, the often-made but highly restrictive independence assumption between preferences and wages is key. To overcome this restriction, we propose a flexible estimation strategy that nests commonly used models. We show that loosening the exogeneity assumption leads to labor supply elasticities that are much higher.