This paper develops and calibrates a model with endogenous schooling and returns to schooling to explain Mincerian returns variation across countries, and assess the importance of schooling on output variation. The calibrated model is able to explain forty percent of the variation in the data, substantially more than linear regressions explain. Variation in the direct costs of schooling driven by government funding levels relative to enrollment rates and fertility rates contribute the most to the explanatory power of the model. Nevertheless, high effective discount rates are needed to reconcile the high level of Mince-rian returns in the data. In the calibrated model, schooling contributes on average one-third to output per worker.

Tax benefits to owner-occupied housing provide incentives for housing consumption, offsetting weaker disincentives of the property tax. These benefits also help counter the penalty federal taxes impose on households who work in productive high-wage areas, but reinforce incentives to consume local amenities. We simulate the effects of these benefits in a parameterized model, and determine the consequences of various tax reforms. Reductions in housing tax benefits generally reduce inefficiency in consumption, but increase inefficiency in location decisions, unless they are accompanied by tax-rate reductions. The most efficient policy would eliminate most tax benefits to housing and index taxes to local wage levels.

Some years ago, we initiated the development of a linkage program relying on systematic and automated tools and procedures to match microdata from the Canadian censuses to those from Quebec civil records. The development of this program is at the heart of the construction of the Integrated Infrastructure of the Quebec Population Historical Microdata (IQPM) which will integrate all available historical microdata on the Quebec population dating back to the beginning of European settlement, into a set of relational databases. In this paper, we will describe the development and implementation of the linkage program which contains three modules: one for linking census data to BALSAC families; one for linking BALSAC families to census data; and one for linking sets of data from distinct censuses. We will illustrate how it works by providing examples of linkage results and estimates of success rates from datasets on the city of Trois-Rivières and on the Saguenay region for seven modern nominal censuses (1852 to 1911). We will also emphasize how the linkage of census and vital data can make a major contribution to the construction of census-based longitudinal datasets. When completed, the IQPM will comprise data from these seven censuses on close to a million individuals belonging to 161,000 distinct households from two urban settings and three regions mixing rural and urban environments. All these data will have been linked to corresponding vital event records from the BALSAC database. To conclude, we will give an overview of the research opportunities that will emerge from the matching of the two types of data both for the social and the biological sciences as this vast array of biographical information will permit studies based on individual trajectories situated within families, households and communities and examined from a multigenerational perspective.

Studies consistently document a Hispanic paradox in U.S. adult mortality, whereby Hispanics have similar or lower mortality rates than non-Hispanic whites despite lower socioeconomic status. This study extends this line of inquiry to disability, especially among foreign-born Hispanics, since their advantaged mortality seemingly should be paired with health advantages more generally. We also assess whether the paradox extends to U.S.-born Hispanics to evaluate the effect of nativity. We calculate multistate life tables of life expectancy with disability to assess whether racial/ethnic and nativity differences in the length of disability-free life parallel differences in overall life expectancy. Our results document a Hispanic paradox in mortality for foreign-born and U.S.-born Hispanics. However, Hispanics low mortality rates are not matched by low disability rates. Their disability rates are substantially higher than those of non-Hispanic whites and generally similar to those of non-Hispanic blacks. The result is a protracted period of disabled life expectancy for Hispanics, both foreign- and U.S.-born.

El trabajo aborda la migración irregular de mujeres provenientes de Guatemala, Honduras y El Salvador que viajan por el país para llegar a Estados Unidos. El objetivo es indagar sobre posibles diferencias en las características sociodemográfi cas y de viaje, de acuerdo al país de origen, así como explorar la relación entre las características anteriores y el tiempo de tránsito por México. La fuente de datos es la Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Sur de México de los años 2010 a 2013. Entre los resultados se advierte que las mujeres guatemaltecas que viajan por el país son más jóvenes y con menores niveles educativos, en comparación con los otros dos grupos, mientras que las hondureñas son madres solteras en su mayoría. Asimismo, se observaron diferencias en las características de viaje, pues las salvadoreñas recurren a un coyote para viajar por México e internarse a Estados Unidos en mayor medida que las mujeres que proceden de los otros países. Finalmente, el uso de coyote reduce el tiempo de tránsito por el país.

Universal screening of toddlers for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in pediatric practice is recommended to potentially reduce racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in timing of diagnosis. Early diagnosis of ASD has been associated with higher parent education and income but not with ethnicity in some studies, while others report that economically disadvantaged children and African American and Latino children are diagnosed later or not at all (Fombonne, 2003; Fountain, King, & Bearman, 2011; Liptak et al., 2008). Screening for ASD may currently be more common among lower income and minority children (Arunyanart et al., 2012). The current sample of 18,669 children was drawn from screening sites at the University of Connecticut (n = 9587, 51.4%) or Georgia State University (n = 9082, 48.6%). Socioeconomic status (SES) was estimated by Census Tract median income data. Most analyses compared children in the Majority group (White children; n= 6169, 68.9%) and the Minority group (all other racial/ethnic groups; n= 2789, 31.3%). Small but significant disparities by race/ethnicity, controlling for median income, were observed in child age at M-CHAT screening, age at M- CHAT Follow-up Interview (FUI), and time from M-CHAT to FUI. Black/African American and Latino children were screened and followed up at later ages, but not evaluated later, perhaps due to differential attrition. Minority and lower income children also had higher scores on the M- CHAT, but Majority and higher income children had higher scores on the M-CHAT FUI. Minority and lower income children screened positive more frequently on certain individual M- CHAT items, including all reverse-scored items, while Majority children screened positive more frequently on certain M-CHAT FUI items. Finally, positive predictive value (PPV) of the M- CHAT and M-CHAT FUI procedure did not differ by race/ethnicity, in contrast to previous studies. In conclusion, standardized screening procedures employed in the current study largely eliminated disparities in screening, follow-up, and evaluation for ASD in toddlers. Item response patterns also differed by both race/ethnicity and SES, underscoring the need for vigilance and support for parent understanding of M-CHAT items in pediatric practice.

Mobility of skilled labor and especially researchers is an important source for strengthening competitiveness and innovative capacity. This study compares migration inflows to Germany and the US by means of recent microdata: the German Microcensus and the US American Community Survey. It is found that migration to the USA favors the skill intensity while in Germany employment of skilled immigrants is still underdeveloped.

This paper examines the labor market performance of immigrants during the early twentieth-century America. In particular, we consider the immigrants from Europe, Asia,and South America who were present in America between 1900 and 1930 to investigate the degree of human capital transferability across the regions of origin. Accounting for the changes in unobserved immigrant quality across cohorts, we estimate the returns to work experience in the American labor market. The estimation results show that European immigrants assimilated into the American labor market fairly well while immigrants from Asia and South America did not, which is suggestive of imperfect human capital mobility. In addition, the estimation results obtained from synthetic cohorts indicate that the qualityof immigrants was systematically different across years of arrival.

During the period from childhood through young adulthood individuals select the occupation that best satisfies their needs based on their values, interests, education, and environment. Arlington County, Virginia, provides an opportunity to study the impact that geography played on occupational choice for one black community during segregation. Using qualitative methods, this article explores the occupational choices of Arlington’s African Americans as Arlington grew from a scattering of farm settlements to a prosperous white suburb of Washington, D.C. Washington’s black high schools offered excellent career training and the government offered Civil Service employment. The arrival in Arlington of the Pentagon building and large numbers of white federal workers provided new sources of employment but obliterated existing farm and factory work. The article concludes that Arlington’s geography, that is, its proximity to the federal government in Washington, had both a positive and a negative influence on Arlington’s African Americans when choosing their occupations.

Environ un million de Canadiens français ont émigré vers les États-Unis entre 1865 et 1930, s’établissant majoritairement dans les États de la Nouvelle-Angleterre. À l’aide de données de recensements américains et canadiens, cette étude examine comment la scolarité et la fréquentation scolaire de leurs descendants se comparent avec ceux de Québécois francophones du même âge. Les données des recensements canadien de 1971 et américain de 1970 nous révèlent que les résidents natifs de la Nouvelle-Angleterre dont la langue maternelle était le français ont profité d’un avantage considérable sur le plan de la scolarité. J’attribue cet écart important à leur accès au système public d’éducation des États-Unis, qui n’avait pas d’équivalent au Québec jusqu’à la fin des années soixante. Ce résultat est encore plus remarquable étant donné la sélection négative présumée en regard de ceux qui quittaient le Québec et le fait que les Franco-Américains réussissaient à reproduire relativement bien les institutions d’enseignement québécoises. En examinant les recensements canadien de 2000 et américain de 2001, on constate que l’écart s’est considérablement résorbé chez les plus jeunes. En fait, contrairement à ce qui est observé en 1971, les jeunes Québécois en 2001 avaient à peu près la même scolarité et étaient au moins aussi susceptibles d’avoir atteint un niveau d’études postsecondaire que les Franco-Américains. Toutefois, ils accusent toujours un retard lorsqu’il s’agit de détenir . . .

The recent structural approach to evaluating the impact of immigration on US wage inequality has mainly concluded that this impact has only been small. Yet the usefulness of this conclusion has been questioned mainly due to the low robustness of the empirical estimates of structural parameters. This article proposes a modification to the structural framework, where the arguments of the national production function are the workers' skills instead of the workers themselves. This modification both implies important theoretical advantages and allows robust estimation of the structural parameters. Applied in simulations, this modified framework confirms the conclusion that recent US immigration has only had a minor impact on native wage inequality.

This thesis examines the unique residential geographies of those identifying as multiracial in metropolitan Atlanta according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Using a concept of segregation and diversity as overlapping in the context of an increasingly complex racial landscape, I ask in what sorts of neighborhoods do those who represent diversity at the very level of their bodies find themselves in place in a landscape characterized by uneven segregation. Results support that multiracial individuals tend to avoid places of low diversity and the notion of an emerging stratified ternary racial structure over that of a binary or triracial structure.

Economists have long recognized that schooling and experience are two of the most important aspects of earnings determination. Given the importance of these two variables, a natural question is: how do es their interaction affect earnings? In other words, do educated workers have a higher or lower wage increase as they accumulate experience? Which theories can explain this relationship?

This paper investigates the impact of corporate taxation on employment, personal income, and the size of the business sector. Our identification strategy exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states over the period 1970-2010 and compares economic outcomes of contiguous counties that straddle state borders. This methodology both establishes a counterfactual and eliminates omitted-variable biases resulting from the confounding influence of unobserved variation in local economic conditions. This allows us to interpret our results causally. We find that corporate tax increases reduce employment, personal incomes, and the size of the business sector, while corporate tax cuts increase personal incomes but not employment. The effects are disproportionately strong in low-income and rural areas, in areas with low levels of unionization, and in right-to-work states.

New York City is facing a youth employment crisis, with unprecedented numbers of young people reaching adulthood without the skills or experiences to secure career-track jobs that pay a living wage. Since 2000, the percentage of 16 to 24 year olds across the five boroughs participating in the labor market has fallen from 45 percent to 29 percent, while the unemployment rate for this group has spiked from 13 percent to 20 percent. Alarmingly, approximately one out of every five New Yorkers in this age bracket--an estimated 172,000 in all--are neither working nor in school, by far the largest number of any city in the United States. Despite the magnitude of the problem, New York City's youth workforce development system falls far short of what is needed. Youth-focused workforce programs reach only a tiny fraction of the young adults who could benefit from employment and training services. At the same time, too many of the city's existing youth workforce development programs are deeply flawed and do little to help young people build skills and connect with decent-paying jobs. The five workforce programs run by the city's Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), the city's primary youth workforce agency, served fewer than 41,000 young people last year. DYCD's signature initiative, the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), enrolled 35,957 young people in 2013 but had to turn away almost three times that number due to insufficient capacity. Perhaps even more alarming, DYCD's four other workforce programs served fewer than 5,000 youth combined last year. But while the city's youth workforce system could undoubtedly benefit from more resources, it also needs a major restructuring. Indeed, as this report documents, the three city agencies that provide the bulk of youth workforce development services in the city--DYCD, the Department of Small Business Services (SBS) and the Human Resources Administration (HRA)--all have major shortcomings when it comes to helping young New Yorkers gain the education, skills and experiences necessary for career-track employment. The conclusion of this report is that a new level of focus and a new approach is desperately needed to power improvements to the city's youth workforce development system. [Additional research support for this report was provided by Chirag Bhatt, Stephanie Chan, Josefa Silva, Dara Taylor, Xin Wang, Arielle Wiener-Bronner, Barbara Wijering-van Wyck, Christopher Zoia, and Nadia Zonis.]

This thesis examines the rise of American Midwestern breweries from 1870 to 1940, a period when these companies became the largest breweries in America. These years are important in the expansion of the breweries in the cities of Milwaukee and St. Louis because they were at a time when technological advancements in both producing and shipping beer, greatly helped them expand their markets beyond the cities they originally started in. Even though the prohibition amendment may have shut down the breweries temporarily, they were better prepared when beer became legal again because of their infrastructure and production capacities they had built up in the years preceding prohibition. Through analyzing the histories, production numbers, and geographic elements of how these breweries became so big I have come to the conclusion that these breweries were better set up going into prohibition and thrived afterwards because of this.

This paper estimates how household college investment in Texas responded to a 2003 constitutional amendment that relaxed restrictions on home equity lending. First, I document how homeowning families can lower their college financing costs by relying on home equity lines of credit, rather than traditional federal student loans. Second, I exploit the fact that the amendment provides plausibly exogenous variation in household credit for homeowners in Texas but not renters and not homeowners in other states. By comparing outcomes between these groups, I show that when homeowners are allowed to take out home equity lines of credit, enrolled students in homeowning families exhibit yearly increases in college tuition and net price that amount to roughly $4,500 per line of credit. In the presence of capacity constraints, increases in homeowner enrollment at the top and at the bottom of the 4-year college quality hierarchy are offset by decreases in renter enrollment, and some renters forgo college altogether rather than choosing to attend a 2-year college. The availability of home equity financing thus widens existing gaps in college investment levels between homeowning and renting families. The increase in privately available credit also allows more selective Texas institutions to raise tuition prices by more than $2,300, simultaneously re-allocating institutional aid away from homeowning families toward renters.

This study investigated whether state levels of social capital are associated with rates of completed suicides in the fifty U.S. states. To do this we regressed state-level suicide rates on an index of social capital, along with other variables known to influence suicide rates such as gun ownership, income inequality, alcohol abuse and dependence, drug abuse and dependence, serious mental illness, unemployment, percent of population living in urban areas, poverty, population instability, and living in a “suicide belt” state. Suicide rates were aggregated from 1999 to 2002, and examined separately by sex and different race/ethnic groups. The results showed that White men and women in states with higher levels of social capital had significantly lower rates of suicide when controlling for the other influential variables. When we examined sub-dimensions of social capital, we found that community organizations (for White women) and group membership (for White men) were particularly strongly associated with lower suicide risk.

A study through quantitative case selection of interstate highway road alignments throughout the United States as they relate to the racial composition of the tracts in 1960 with additional qualitative studying of areas with abnormal distribution of road placement.