The severity of the recent global financial and economic crisis has led to sustained interest in its origins. While commentators continue to debate the core causes, many observers have pointed to the role of changes in Americans’ spending, most visibly the bubble in housing spending (Case, Coman and Hepburn 2008; Baily and Elliott 2009), but exemplified also by spending for instant gratification and a lack of restraint in spending on luxury goods. Indeed, some observers suggest a crisis in American consumption – that Americans consume too much, at too great a cost – in brief, that Americans are “overspent” or have “luxury fever” (Schor 1998; Frank 1999). While the conception of the United States as a consumer society is far from new (Ewen 1976; Featherstone 1991; Calder 1999), recent critiques argue that emulative and competitive consumption has intensified over recent decades, in large part due to increasing income . . .

This study uses longitudinal population-based samples of young siblings to examine the effects of two hypothesized moderators of early externalizing behaviors: parental emotional support and family socioeconomic status. The first sample, a twin sample 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. Results indicated stronger genetic influences on externalizing at lower levels of parental emotional support but higher levels of socioeconomic status; only the latter interaction remained significant when the two moderators were simultaneously modeled. These moderation effects were not replicated in our analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Supplement (CNLSY) data, which contained 1939 pairs of full and half siblings measured on externalizing at ages 45 and ages 67. Our results highlight the need for replication in quantitative behavior genetics research on externalizing behaviors. Potential causes for non-replication are discussed.

This paper addresses the issue of electoral change in the states in a number of ways. First, I document the magnitude, direction, and effects of changes in party support in presidential outcomes in the states. In some states there have been substantial changes in partisan support, sometimes favoring the Democratic Party and sometimes the Republican Party, while a handful of states have been remarkably stable. the second part of the paper analyzes the sources of the changes in the context of a dynamic model that focuses on how changes in state population characteristics are associated with changes in party support. Although some of the commonly identified culprits of partisan change do bear some impact in isolation, they take a back seat to changes in longer-term political factors. finally, the third part of the paper is an attempt to provide some sense of how the changing political environment combines with changing state populations to produce changes in party performance on Election Day.

This paper develops an inexplicably understudied variable with far-reaching implications for immigrants' experience: whether an immigrant was a member of a minority group in his or her country of origin. I investigate three groups of Israeli-born immigrants in the United States: Israeli Palestinians, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Jewish majority. Using the US censuses and American Community Surveys, I show that each group possesses different socioeconomic and demographic characteristics as well as different cultural and economic trajectories. Ultra-Orthodox Jews display processes of separation; the Jewish majority displays processes of integration; and Israeli Palestinians display processes of accelerated integration. In addition, analysis of these three groups' background and self-selection mechanisms, utilizing data from the Israeli Social Survey, provides a better understanding of these profound differences.

In this paper we estimate the impacts on income tax collections of legalizing same-sex marriage. We utilize new individual-level data sources to estimate the federal income tax consequences of legalizing same-sex marriages. These data sources also allow us to estimate the impact of legalization on state income tax collections. We find that 23 states would realize a net fiscal benefit from legalization, while 21 states would experience a decline in revenue. The potential (annual) changes in state tax revenue range from negative $29 million in California to positive $16 million in New York. At the federal level, our estimates suggest an overall reduction in revenues, ranging from a potential loss of $187 million to $580 million. Overall, we find that the federal and state impacts are quite modest. We also find that our estimates are only marginally affected by alternative assumptions about how many same-sex couples will choose to marry and which partner will claim any children for tax deduction purposes.

This paper provides direct evidence on the extent of monopsony power in the low-wage labor market by estimating the firm-level elasticity of labor supply for nurse aides in the long-term care (nursing home) industry. Using exogenous variation in hiring induced by the passage of a state minimum nurse staffing law, I find that facilities initially out of compliance with the new law did not have to raise their wage offers relative to their competitors in order to hire more nurses. While this is consistent with perfect competition in simple monopsony models of the labor market, I discuss how the results may be more ambiguous in more complicated models.

The $15-an-hour minimum wage in Seattle has been focused on a debate over tipped workers, who according to our analysis, comprise of less than 10% of workers who earn below $15 an hour. In this policy brief, we shine a spotlight on all tipped workers in Seattle, so that city elected officials can focus on practical solutions for raising the minimum wage, instead of relying on speculation about who tipped workers are and what incomes they earn. To inform our research, we combined an analysis of government data with interviews of workers in various tipped professions. Our analysis demonstrates that the average tipped worker in Seattle is roughly 32 years old, has at least some level of college education, and earns less than $15 an hour even if you include tips in their hourly earnings.

Objective. To identify the risk and protective factors of suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Methods. Using a negative binomial regression analysis and state-level data, pooled data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2005-2010), and the 2000 U.S. Census to examine the state-level predictors of suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Results. An increase in the states urban population is associated with increased suicide rates among American Indians and Alaska Natives. An increase in the young male population is associated with decreased suicide risk for the population. No association was found related to religious adherence, or gun ownership. Conclusion. The results underscore the need for further demographic controls in the assessment of suicide for American Indians and Alaska Natives.

This paper explores the relationship between job polarization and interindustry wage differentials. Usingthe U.S. Census and EU KLEMS data, we find that the progress of job polarization between 1980 and 2009 was more evident in industries that initially paid a high wage premium to workers than in industries that did not. With a two-sector neoclassical growth model to highlight the key mechanism, we argue that this phenomenon can be explained as a dynamic response of firms to interindustry wage differentials: firms with a high wage premium seek alternative ways to cut production costs by replacing workers who perform routine tasks with Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) capital. The replacement of routine workers with ICT capital has become more pronounced as the price of ICT capital has fallen over the past 30 years. As a result, firms that are constrainedto pay a relatively high wage premium have experienced slower growth of employment of routine workers than firms in low-wage industries, which led to heterogeneity in jobpolarization across industries.

The baby-boom and subsequent baby-bust have shaped much of the history of the second half of the 20th century; yet it is still largely unclear what caused them. This paper presents a new unified explanation of the fertility Boom-Bust that links the latter to the Great Depression and the subsequent economic recovery. We show that the 1929 Crash attracted young married women 20 to 34 years old in 1930 (whom we name D-cohort) in the labor market possibly via an added worker effect. Using several years of Census micro data, we further document that the same cohort kept entering into the market in the 1940s and 1950s as economic conditions improved, decreasing wages and reducing work incentives for younger women. Its retirement in the late 1950s and in the 1960s instead freed positions and created employment opportunities. Finally, we show that the entry of the D-cohort is associated with increased births in the 1950s, while its retirement turned the fertility Boom into a Bust in the 1960s. The work behavior of this cohort explains a large share of the changes in both yearly births and completed fertility of all cohorts involved.

A significant obstacle to studying business cycle properties of job polarization has been the presence of inconsistencies in aggregate employment data for different occupation groups. In order to overcome this problem, we construct aggregate hours series using the method of 'conversion factors', which was originally developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After showing that our data outperform previously available data in terms of consistency, we analyze two business cycle properties of job polarization that have not yet been studied before: (1) the changes in volatility of employment of each occupation group since the mid-1980s and (2) the asymmetric effects of recessions on employment of different occupation groups. We find that employment volatility of middle-skill occupations has decreased by 40% since the mid-1980s due to jobless recoveries observed in the last three recessions. JEL classification: C82, E24, E32 for their helpful comments. We also thank Tomaz Cajner for providing Stata codes for CPS Basic Monthly data. Yu Jung Whang provided excellent research assistance. Yang gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Monash University.

A sustainable and successful economic future requires forward thinking but predicting the economic future is a challenging task, and the huge technological changes that we have already seen - combined with what is yet to come - only make it more difficult. Futurists are split on whether technological advances will produce a net increase or decrease in employment, and rapid changes in technology mean that the jobs of the future may be vastly different than what we see today. According to the authors because young workers are the first to experience this new era, they offer a unique lens into what may be to come. The authors look at trends already impacting today’s Millennial in the changing workplace, analyze millennial worker habits and aspirations, and see how they align with established projections. Young workers will have to be prepared to approach the workplace from a new perspective - with creativity, versatility, technological literacy, and the ability to adapt to high-demand fields - and many Millennials already bring that perspective and tech-savvy background, if not the specific experience required. However, there are huge disparities in how young people prepare for careers. To make the future workplace a positive reality for all workers, the authors suggest that it is crucial to identify and alleviate the digital divide, while also revamping our higher education . . .

Wage-gap profiles of a rapidly growing group of new Asian immigrants from countries that were underrepresented in USA until 1965 are studied. Entry-level wages and assimilation rates fall across cohorts. However the wage gap versus natives widens for all new Asian cohorts after the second decade of stay, which is not seen for other immigrant groups. If occupations are imperfect substitutes, and natives and immigrants are worse substitutes than entrant and established immigrants within occupations, then the comparatively larger increases in new Asian inflows exert a more negative impact on their wages, compared to other groups. The explanation is studied in a nested CES framework. Elasticity parameters are estimated using cross-metropolitan variations in occupational and immigrant labor supply. Local labor supply is instrumented by using predicted inflows of entrants into a metropolitan and occupation, inferred from the location and occupational distribution of previous own-country immigrants. Finally, model estimates from 1990 are used to predict the occupational native-immigrant wage gap in 2000 attributable to competition from rising supplies of substitute labor. The predicted gap is larger than the real gap, since the U.S. followed a preferential policy towards high-skill labor in the 1990s.

Recent studies have examined the effect of political conflict and domestic terrorism on economic and political outcomes. This paper uses the rise in mass violence between 1870 and 1940 as an historical experiment for determining the impact of ethnic and political violence on economic activity, namely patenting. I find that violent acts account for more than 1,100 missing patents compared to 726 actual patents among African American inventors over this period. Valuable patents decline in response to major riots and segregation laws. Absence of the rule of law covaries with declines in patent productivity for white and black inventors, but this decline is significant only for African American inventors. Patenting responds positively to declines in violence. These findings imply that ethnic and political conflict may affect the level, direction, and quality of invention and economic growth over time.

Researchers have long used mathematical models and empirical data to explore the population ecology of childhood diseases such as measles and whooping cough. These diseases have proven ideal model systems for studying population dynamics over space and time. Here we present a novel dataset of weekly measles and whooping cough case reports in pre-vaccine era U.S. cities and states, along with a previously-studied dataset of measles in England and Wales. We first estimate per-population disease reporting probabilities. We find that disease reporting is highly variable over space and between diseases, and correlated with socioeconomic covariates including ethnic composition and school attendance. Using these reporting estimates, we infer the long-term, marginal distribution of disease incidence for each population. This describes a probabilistic measure of disease persistence that compares favorably with a classic threshold persistence measure, critical community size (CCS). The U.S. and England & Wales exhibit similar patterns of measles incidence distributions: larger populations show higher mean incidence and lower variance. The per-time probability of local extinction (conditioned on population size) is higher in the U.S. than in England and Wales, likely due to larger distance between U.S. cities. Finally, we use observed persistence and inferred incidence distributions to estimate the per-time probability of true persistence. Estimated persistence of whooping cough is much higher than persistence of measles (conditioned on population size). We find that cryptic persistence (the difference between observed and estimated persistence) of whooping cough is most common in small populations, while for measles cryptic persistence is most common in medium-sized populations that hover at the edge of extinction. Our results show that variation in disease reporting can significantly affect meta-population estimates of disease persistence, such as CCS. The distributional estimates of incidence presented here explicitly account for incomplete reporting, providing summaries of long-term ecological patterns that are comparable between metapopulations. These measures can provide disease control programs with valuable information on where disease incidence is expected to be higher or lower than expected based on population size alone.

This paper develops an inexplicably understudied variable with far-reaching implications for immigrants experience: whether an immigrant was a member of a minority group in his or her country of origin. I investigate three groups ofIsraeli-born immigrants in the United States: Israeli Palestinians, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Jewish majority. Using the US censuses and American Community Surveys, I show that each group possesses different socioeconomic and demographic characteristics as well as different cultural and economic trajectories. Ultra-Orthodox Jews display processes of separation; the Jewish majority displays processes of integration; and Israeli Palestinians display processes of accelerated integration. In addition,analysis of these three groups background and self-selection mechanisms, utilizing data from the Israeli Social Survey, provides a better understanding of these profound differences.

In a joint custody regime, both parents are given equal preference by the court while granting the custodial rights of their children in the event of divorce. Using 50 years of census data for the United States population, I show that growing up in a joint custody regime leads to lower educational attainment and worse labor market outcomes. My results are robust to different model specifications and apply to both males and females.

In this policy brief, we shine a spot light on all tipped workers in Seattle, so that city elected officials can focus on practical solutions for raising the minimum wage, instead of relying on speculation about who tipped workers are and what their incomes they earn. To inform our research, we combined an analysis of government data with interviews of workers in various tipped professions. Our analysis demonstrates that the average tipped worker in Seattle is roughly 32 years old, has at least some level of college education, and earns less than $15 an hour- even if you include tips in their hourly earnings.

The negative outcomes of the Great Recession have been multifaceted, affecting many areas of family economic well-being. The U.S. economy lost 8.7 million jobs between December 2007 and January 2010. Although the recession officially ended in June 2009, the national unemployment rate remains approximately 1.5 percentage points higher than the pre-recession rate, even though the total number of of jobs lost during the recession has been recovered. Similarly, long-term unemployment is prevalent, with length of unemployment averaging 37.1 weeks. Furthermore, involuntary part-time work increased during the recession and has remained relatively constant. These statistics translate into continued hardship for many Americans, exemplified in the decline in median household income since the onset of the Great Recession.