America’s prisons disproportionately house African American males. Incarceration has become almost a norm for the experience of many blacks. One common explanation for the high concentration of black males in prisons and jails is the rise of drug use and drug sales – particularly of low-priced crack cocaine – in the 1980s. This explanation proffered by Fryer, et al. 1 and in the popular media undermines an alternative causal explanation for the rise of black incarceration explored in a series of co-authored books and articles over the past 30 years by Myers that argue that there are clear labor market equilibrating effects of black male incarceration and that explicit discrimination in the criminal justice system explains some if not most of the racial disparity in incarceration.2 The discrimination comes in the form of discrimination in stops and frisks, in arrests, in bail setting and release while pending trial, in conviction rates and guilty pleas, in sentence lengths and ultimately in time served. The main distinction between the conventional wisdom – that blacks disproportionately sell and use drugs and therefore are disproportionately arrested and convicted – and the alternative view that racial disparities in incarceration serves a functional purpose in labor markets is a distinction between behavioral explanations for the rise in incarceration vs. structural explanations. This paper reviews the stylized facts about black incarceration rates from 1970 to the present and explores the variety of explanations for the growth in black imprisonment. Two specific empirical tests are conducted in this review. One is a test of the hypothesis that there is an efficiency justification for the racial differential in imprisonment. Using decades-old federal prison data I show the existence of substantial racial discrimination in sentencing that cannot be attributable to racial differences in anticipated recidivism rates. A second test examines the hypothesis that the rise in racial disparities in incarceration is due to increases in arrests for drugs. Surprisingly and quite contrary to popular opinion, I find that increased arrests for drugs had a larger impact on white arrests than on black arrests. The paper then summarizes some of the consequences of the huge racial disparity in incarceration and suggests implications for future research.

The largest twentieth-century increase in US home ownership occurred between 1940 and 1960, associated largely with declining age at first ownership. I shed light on the contribution of coincident government mortgage market interventions by examining home loan benefits granted under the World War II and Korean War GI Bills. Veterans' benefits increased home ownership rates primarily by shifting purchase earlier in life, explaining 7.4 percent of the overall 1940-1960 increase, and 25 percent of the increase for affected cohorts. A rough extrapolation suggests that broader changes in mortgage terms can explain 40 percent of the 1940-1960 increase.

In 2010, according to the United States Census Bureau, among the over 46 million people living in poverty in the United States, approximately 13.2 million (29%) were Hispanic, making them the racial/ethnic minority group most respiresented among the poor. This said, economic growth, expanded income support policies, and efforts to eliminate explicit discriminatory practices contributed to falling poverty rates and a narrowing of the racial and ethnic gaps in poverty before the Great Recession (Cancian & Danziger, 2009). However, large disparities in poverty have persisted, even after the Great Recession that struck a devastating blow to the US . . .

High growth and progressive regions possess a culture that promotes innovation. Innovation depends on a region's ability to use its own existing knowledge and knowledge generated elsewhere. This paper demonstrates the importance of the ability to absorb external knowledge in explaining innovation productivity for 106 U. S. metropolitan areas. Using a spatial interaction model of patent citation flows with origin and destination dependence, the destination fixed-effects coefficients provides a measure of a region's absorptive capacity. We identify local conditions that shape a region's absorptive capacity and demonstrate it has a positive and significant impact on innovation productivity.

Hourly wage data from 1990 to 2011 show a narrowing gap between the median wage and the 10th percentile wage, but an increasing gap between the median and 90th percentile wages. In this paper, I investigate the impact of offshoring on the employment and wage distributions to deter- mine whether it has contributed to this convexification. I use a task-based framework of the labor market with three inputs and model what happens when the world price for the middle task input declines. The model predicts both a decline in domestic employment and a reduction in the wage paid to workers in this task, resulting in a rise in upper tail unemployment. However, I demonstrate that observed wages within an industry can rise due to selection. I construct a proxy measure of offshoring for both service and material inputs, and use industry level production and trade data from the US Census Bureau’s Census of Manufactures, and individual level wage data from the US Census and the American Community Survey to test the implications of the model. Offshoring has the anticipated effects on employment and convexification. I find a negative effect of offshoring on employment and a positive effect of offshoring on upper tail wage inequality. Moreover, current levels of industry offshoring are significantly correlated with an industry’s lagged occupational com- position. In particular, both forms of offshoring decrease with the share of manual occupations and service offshoring increases with the share of routine occupations.

Hedonic property value models have been frequently used to value environmental amenities (or dis-amenities) since markets for these goods (bads) do not usually exist. Typically, researchers cite Rosen’s (1974) seminal work that allows one to interpret functions of the hedonic regression coefficients as the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the environmental good. A key assumption needed for the Rosen result to hold is market equilibrium. Recent years have witnessed extreme circumstances, such as wild swings in housing prices, high levels of mortgage default, and most significantly, high levels of foreclosure when this assumption is unlikely to hold. In this paper, we address the following question "How can we interpret the coefficient estimates for environmental goods in hedonic property value models where markets are dominated by foreclosures?" We then focus on housing market conditions when interpreting the hedonic literature on (airport) noise, Superfund sites, air quality, and flood risk

Approximately one-third of pregnant women reported having seen or talked to a family physician for medical care during the prior year, a percentage that remained stable for the period of 2000 to 2009 (adjusted odds ratio for annual change = 1.006). Most pregnant women reported care from multiple types of clinicians, including family physicians, obstetrician-gynecologists, midwives, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. There were regional differences in trends in family physician care; pregnant women in the North Central United States increasingly reported care from family physicians, whereas women in the South reported a decline (6.7% annual increase vs 4.7% annual decrease, P .001).

We consider a competitive equilibrium growth model where technological progress is embodied into new jobs that are assigned to workers of different skills. In every period workers decide whether to actively participate in the labor market and if so how many hours to work on the job. Balanced growth requires that the job technology is complementary with the worker's total labor input in the job, which is jointly determined by his skill and his working hours. Since lower skilled workers can supply longer hours, we show that the equilibrium features positive assortative matching (higher skilled workers are assigned to better jobs) only if differences in consumption are small relative to differences in worker skills. When the pace of technological progress accelerates, wage inequality increases and workers participate less often in the labor market but supply longer hours on the job. This mechanism can explain why, as male wage inequality has increased in the US, labor force participation of male workers of different skills has fallen while their working hours have increased.

This study investigates the role of immigrant composition in creating the observed negative correlation between immigrant supply and immigrant wages in US time series, which has recently been interpreted as evidence of immigrant-native complementarities in production. The main finding is that compositional effects fully explain this empirical pattern. Newly-arrived immigrants, notably Latin Americans, earn less than previous immigrants. Hence their presence decreases average immigrant wages, mechanically. Controlling for this, no negative relation between immigrant supply and immigrant wages remains. More generally, the findings highlight problems in structural estimation of wage effects of immigration, and also the need to distinguish between effects of immigrants of different origins.

In this paper we analyze the impact of foreign-born workers in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) on employment and wages in Canadian geographical areas during the period 1991-2006. Canadian policies select immigrants with a strong emphasis on high educational attainment. Moreover the foreign-born constitute a third of the Canadian population making Canada a very good case to analyze the effect of foreign-STEM workers on the local economy. We use the dispersion of immigrants by nationality across 17 geographical areas in 1981 to predict the supply-driven increase in foreign Scientists and Engineers during the period 1991-2006. Then we analyze their impact on the employment and wages of college and non-college educated Canadian-born (native) workers. We find significant positive effects on the wages and (to a lesser extent) employment of college educated natives. We also find a smaller positive effect on the wages and employment of native workers with very low levels of education (i.e. those with no high school degree). This implies a positive productivity effect of foreign-STEM workers in Canada, and also a college bias in their contribution to productivity growth. Compared to the effect of foreign Scientists and Engineers in US cities, the Canadian results show similar effects on wages of college educated and at least partial evidence of a positive diffusion of the effect to non-college educated, which was not present in the US.

Over the past 30 years, the United States has seen a great transference of wealth from its old manufacturing regions to its regions of comparatively less wealth. This transfer can be explained through Convergence Theory, which predicts exactly that type of movement. However, some locations of initial wealth managed to maintain their position of comparative wealth, suggesting an additional force influencing the locations of investment. The Product Life Cycle (PLC) helps explain those outliers, as it suggests places with high wage, skilled labor will be attractive for the development and production of new products. To test these competing theories, we develop an unconditional convergence model and apply it to the 1980-2010 United States at the county level of aggregation in both Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) specifications. Both models indicate the presence of convergence, though the global OLS fails to account for locations offering early stage PLC benefits. The local GWR significantly improves model fit, and provides evidence of late stage PLC filtering down and convergence through capturing rapid growth of regions of initially low investment, but also evidence of reinvestment in high skilled (wage) locations consistent with the early stages of the PLC.

This paper examines the impact of residency laws on teachers' wages and residential choice using the natural experiment created by the repeal of the residency laws for teachers. I find that the repeal of residency requirements increases public school teachers' wages by approximately ten percent on average and has varying effects across different demographic groups. Residency laws do not seem to affect private school teachers' wages. The data also indicate a significant outflow of residents after the repeal. In order to further investigate whether there is a relocation of teachers due to residency laws, I look at where public school teachers are sending their children for schooling. Residency laws might in fact induce public school teachers to enroll their children in private schools, as they restrict teachers from moving to an area with a preferred public schooling system. The results suggest that the probability that public school teachers will enroll their children in private school decreases by 0.15 percentage points after the repeal of the residency law.

Previous research has shown that immigrants wages decrease when the supply of immigrants increases. This negative correlation has been interpreted as evidence of immigrantnative complementarities in production. The present study finds that it is instead due to changing immigrant composition.

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.

This paper examines the effect of labor market conditions—measured through unemployment, mass layoffs and predicted employment—on child abuse and neglect using county-level data from California. Using these indicators we separately estimate the effects of overall and gender-specific economic shocks. We find only modest evidence of a link between overall economic conditions and child maltreatment. However, analysis by gender reveals robust evidence that maltreatment decreases with indicators for male employment and increases with indicators for female employment. These opposite-signed effects are consistent with a theoretical framework that builds on family-time-use models and is supported by analysis of time-use data.

This paper examines the role of social classes cleavages on in-kind redistribution. In presence of heterogeneous income as well as heterogeneous preferences over the types of public goods provided, the total amount of redistribution depends on the distance between those preferences. Under very general assumptions, we describe an environment in which the more a society is fractionalized, the less redistribution we can expect. In particular, with respect to the baseline model with heterogeneous incomes but homogeneous preferences over public goods, social distance decreases the amount of public goods preferred by all individuals. Our paper innovates the previous literature on this topic under two main perspectives: it allows for heterogeneity in both income and preferences and it considers an N-dimensional policy space. An empirical investigation based on US survey data confirms the main result of our theoretical model, that more heterogeneous societies provide a lower quantity of public goods to their members, while more unequal societies in terms of income experience more in-kind redistribution.

This paper identifi es the e ffect of a bilateral trade shock on the labor market value of ethnic capital specifi c to the trade partner. Speci cally, I examine the eff ect of NAFTA on the labor market outcomes of Mexican descendants in the US. I employ di fference-in-di fference and triple difference techniques using three waves of the US population census. I fi nd that the demand for middle- and high-skilled Mexican descendants increases in the post-NAFTA period, as reflected in their wages and employment in the manufacturing sector. This e ffect mostly comes from industries that increased their trade with Mexico after the implementation of the agreement. The effect seems to be non-linear in regard to trade exposure. For high-skilled individuals, it sets in only after the increase in trade is large enough, while for the middle-skill group, NAFTA's e ffect increases with trade intensifi cation with Mexico. The effect is strongest among management and sales-related occupations, occupations directly involved in information diff usion and transmission, con firming that the observed increases in demand stem from changes in the value of ethnicity-related information. Relative wages of Mexican descendants employed in trade-related occupations grow substantially faster after the implementation of NAFTA, while employment remain constant. Descendants from other Latin American countries are not found to be systematically a ffected by the shock, suggesting that it is inherently Mexico-specific traits that rise in value. The results show that trade effects on wages and employment have an ethnic component. These results suggest that the ethnic capital immigrants bring with them to the host country becomes productive and valuable when the costs to trade between the source and host countries decrease.

Collective remittances are those sent by migrants' associations and used for investment in social and productive projects in their hometowns. A unique program in Mexico, 3x1 Para Migrantes, aims to multiply the benefits of this kind of social capital: government funds are matched with collective remittances and invested in community projects. I propose a potential effect of the program: the amenities and job opportunities generated by these projects can alter local labor markets, making people more likely to stay and work in the municipality instead of migrating. Using panel data from the evaluation of this program and from the Mexican Family Life Survey, I study the effect of collective remittances on the probability of wanting to migrate, being employed and in the labor force, and on the amount of hours worked of men and women in 2002 and 2005 in Mexico. Results from these estimations show that, in general, collective remittances, measured as the per capita investment through the 3x1 Program, have a positive, albeit modest, impact on the employment and labor force participation of men and women in Mexican municipalities that participate in the program, but no effect on the preferences to migrate, at least in the short run. Collective remittances, however, may have ambiguous effects depending on the type of projects executed.

It has been well documented that employment outcomes often differ considerably across areas. This article examines the extent to which the local human capital level, measured as the share of prime age adults with a college degree, has positive external effects on labor force participation (LFP) and employment for U.S. metropolitan area residents. The empirical results suggest that the local human capital level has positive externalities on the probability of LFP and employment for both women and men. We also find that less educated workers generally receive the largest external benefits.