This paper analyzes the effect of return migration on the macroeconomic performance of a developing country; and particularly on the incomes of the residents and nationals of the country. One of the leading engines of growth in capital-scarce countries is human capital accumulation. A major factor that acts as a detriment to human capital accumulation in developing countries is brain drain. A considerable proportion of immigrants settle in resource rich countries and it is hard for the home country to provide them with the right incentives to return to their homeland. This paper seeks to formalize this issue through a theoretical model of migration, skill growth, skill spill overs and government incentives to call back the emigrants. It further takes data on the Pakistani population to calibrate the model and suggest policy implications.

Genetic algorithm is a popular classification algorithm which creates a random population of candidate solutions and makes them to evolve into a suitable accurate solution for a given problem by processing them iteratively for several generations. During each generation the training data set is accessed by the genetic algorithm only for the population member's fitness calculation and no other extra knowledge about the problem domain is extracted from the training data set. Even the domain knowledge stored in the chromosome code of the population may be lost in the future generations due to genetic operations. All the genetic operations like crossover and mutation are probability based and they do not depend upon the domain knowledge. This phenomenon makes the genetic algorithm to converge slowly. This paper proposes a genetic algorithm which tries to gain maximum knowledge in between the generations and store them in the form of knowledge chromosomes. The gained knowledge is used to make predictions about the search space and to guide the search process to an area with' potential solutions in the subsequent generations. This makes the genetic algorithm to converge quickly which in turn reduces the learning cost. The experiments show that the run time is reduced considerably when compared with the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm.

This chapter provides an overview of the intergenerational progress of several major immigrant groups in the United States. Drawing on the most recent issues of the CPS, we provide estimates of poverty rates, educational attainment, and occupational attainment among the native born children of immigrants and compare these outcomes to similar estimates of the foreign born with the 1980 Census, allowing for a comparison across generations. We find improvement from the first to second generation for nearly every origin group. To more directly explore the transmission of socioeconomic status among immigrants, we directly link the parental and child outcomes of immigrants in Los Angeles, estimating the relationship between parents’ and children’s educational and occupational outcomes. We find considerable variation in the relationship between parent and child outcomes by origin group, although all immigrants show higher rates of intergenerational mobility than the children of the native born. Traditional assimilation models, as well as the alternative working class and selectivity hypotheses we pose here, do not fully explain these inter- ethnic differences.

This dissertation contributes to a line of research that asks: What motivates individuals to engage in cooperative behaviors or voluntary action for the public good? From the examples above, it seems that individuals do not simply maximize monetary gain, but what else do they maximize? An understanding of such motives is not purely a theoretical curiosity, but instead has important practical consequences for government, employers, fundraisers, and others. As an illustration, consider an individual who makes a donation to a college scholarship fund for underprivileged children in her state. Perhaps she made this donation because she is genuinely concerned about the educational attainment of these children. Or perhaps she made the donation because donating simply makes her feel good, or provides some warm glow.2 The full impact of government spending on scholarships for underprivileged children depends critically on which type of motive is prevalent. If the donor gives because of warm glow, she will continue to give when government increases its own spending activities thereby allowing government toactually increase funding available for the scholarships. If, on the other hand, the donor is concerned about the amount of funding available for scholarships, government spending serves as a fine substitute for donations and so she may reduce her donations. This, then, would limit the ability of government to impact actual funding available for scholarships. This is just one example of how understanding the motives for generosity can make a critical difference in understanding the economic impact of practical decisions made by governments or other groups. This dissertation studies doing good in several settings with the goal of learning about the preferences that lead individuals to do good, which in turn will help us understand the broader impact of government spending, incentives to work for nonprofits, and incentives to donate to nonprofits.

This paper examines the eff ects of the Aff ordable Care Act (ACA) by considering an important interaction between health insurance and disability insurance, which has received little attention in prior literature. Since the ACA provides insurance coverage to the otherwise uninsured, it encourages this group's health investment and reduces their demand for disability insurance later in life. In order to capture this dynamic linkage, the paper extends the Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari incomplete markets model by endogenizing health accumulation, insurance and disability decisions. The model is calibrated to match the 2006 U.S. economy and used to examine the influence of three main components of the ACA: Medicaid expansion, insurance subsidies, and the individual mandate. Findings suggest that the ACA raises tax rates, but reduces the fraction of working-age people receiving disability benefits from 5.7 to 4.9 percent. The associated increase of labor force participation o sets the reduction of working hours and capital, and causes a rise of output by 0.2 percent. Furthermore, for every 100 dollars the government spends on the ACA, it saves 32 dollars on disability insurance and 8 dollars on Medicare for people with disability, and raises revenue by 7 dollars with a fi xed tax rate. Importantly, after adding the disability dimension, a health care reform without Medicaid expansion reduces total tax burdens.

Since 1986, the United States has made considerable efforts to curb undocumented immigration across the USMexico border, resulting in an increase in migration costs for undocumented immigrants from Mexico and placing a particularly heavy burden on undocumented immigrant women. Using data from the 1990, 2000 Decennial Census and the 20068 American Community Survey, this study finds three effects of rising migration costs for immigrants from Mexico: (1) A decrease in the relative flow of older and highly educated undocumented immigrant women relative to men; (2) An increase in the skill composition of immigrant women relative to men; and (3) An increase, due to stronger positive selection, in the average earnings of those groups most affected by increased migration costs, particularly women. This research has important implications in light of the barriers and increasing dangers that women across the globe may face when migrating.

Previous work on the link between macroeconomic conditions and disability has focused almost exclusively on changes in applications for disability benefit programs, not changes in individuals' self-perceived disability status. This article demonstrates that macroeconomic conditions may influence disability through a direct disabling pathway that is distinct from the reservation wage pathway highlighted in previous analyses of disability assistance. State-level analyses using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 19822006 reveal a robust inverse relationship between state GDP per capita and disability among the working-age population. Analyses using individual-level data from the 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) find that currently employed persons are more likely to report a disability if they reside in a local area with higher unemployment rates and that this association exists across levels of education; and finally, a lagged regression model analyzing change in local unemployment from 2008 to 2009, the first year of the Great Recession, finds that an increase in local area unemployment in one year is associated with an increased self-reported disability rate among currently employed workers in the next year. Findings have implications for understanding how macroeconomic downturns influence perceptions of disability and how structural conditions shape individual identity more broadly.

This paper looks at the evidence concerning these claims and finds that a college education remains a good investment. While there are significant differences in earnings by college major, all college degrees offer the potential for life-time earnings significantly greater than the life-time earnings possible with only a high school education. Moreover, the evidence indicates that a college education offers several types of non-economic benefits that mean a higher quality of life for those who undertake the investment.

This volume brings together the latest research and scholarship on Latinos in the United States. This book is special in terms of the broad scope of topics covered and methodologies employed in pursuit of knowledge about Latino students. This collection is also unique in that it features the work of more than a dozen Latino scholars—both early-careerand established—applying their research expertise to investigate and elucidate the educational experiences of Latinos in the United States.

Many Americans want to own their own home. Indeed, survey data reveal that the vast majority of individuals under age 45 expect to purchase a home sometime during their lives, despite the drop in household wealth from the recent housing market crash (Belsky 2013). Homeownership confers social and economic benefits, including tax advantages, “forced” savings, and wealth accumulation – assuming prices rise. The rate of home ownership is often used as a barometer to measure the nation’s overall housing health. When compared over time, home ownership can track the achievements of successive cohorts of adults at the same life-stage and indicate the direction of intergenerational mobility - whether up or down. The conventional home ownership rate, however, can produce misleading conclusions because it is based on households rather than individuals (Yu and Myers 2010). That is, it does not consider those adults who cannot financially establish households on their own, but live with others. Consequently, I analyze “headship” patterns in addition to homeownership when we assess cohorts’ progress in housing – who is able to become established as head of an independent household, at what point in their life cycle, and then potentially become a homeowner. When I analyze the situation in this way, the evidence is overwhelming that recent cohorts face great disadvantages and generational inequalities in home ownership are growing dramatically.

Does the nationality of migrants arriving in any particular territory make a difference for long-term economic development? Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to this day? This paper explores whether the distinct geographical settlement patterns of European migrants according to national origin affected economic development across US counties. It uses historical microdata ? provided in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database ? of the US censuses which coincided with the greatest waves of European migration (1880, 1910) in order to uncover the settlement patterns of migrants of different national origins across the more than 3,000 US counties. We look at the national origin of migrants living in any given US county and at their percentage in the local population of the county at the turn of the 19th century so as to assess whether a greater presence of migrants from specific national origins has influenced and/or continues to influence development patterns across US counties to this day. The analysis also controls for a number of factors which would have determined both the attractiveness of different US counties at the time of migration, as well as current levels of development, including income per capita, population, the unemployment rate, the educational attainment of the population, the percentage of blacks, female labour participation, and employment in agriculture as independent variables. The results indicate that while there is a strong and positive correlation between where migrants settled and current levels of development, this correlation seems to be completely independent of the national origin of migrants. Specific migrant origins ? with the only exception of the English, precisely those with the least problems of adaptation to the new environment ? do not make a difference for long-term economic development whatsoever. This holds for the first and second wave of migration. Hence being settled by Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Poles, or Italians has always been favourable for subsequent economic development. The main difference is simply between counties which received a large influx of migrants, which tend to be significantly richer today, and those that did not.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the topic of education policy. In the first essay, I evaluate the impacts of a teacher quality equity law that was enacted in California in the fall of 2006 prohibiting superintendents from transferring a teacher into a school in the bottom three performance deciles of the state’s academic perfor- mance index if the principal refuses the transfer. The primary mechanism through which the policy should affect student outcomes is through the mix of the quality of teachers in the school. Using publicly available statewide administrative education data, and two quasi-experimental methodologies, I assess whether the policy had an effect on the district-wide distribution of teachers with varying levels of experience, education and licensure and on student academic performance. I extend the analy- sis by examining whether the policy has differential effects on subgroups of schools classified as having high-poverty or high-minority student populations. I find that, as a result of the teacher quality equity law, low-performing schools experienced a relative increase in fully-credentialed teachers and more highly educated teachers, but that did not necessarily translate to an increase in academic performance. I also find evidence that the dimension along which the policy was most effective was in improving teacher pre-service qualifications in schools with high minority student populations. In the second essay, I estimate racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic differ- ences in teacher reports of student absenteeism and tardiness while controlling for administrative records of actual absences. Subjective perceptions that teachers form about students’ classroom behaviors matter for student academic outcomes. Given this potential impact, it is important to identify any biases in these perceptions that would disadvantage subgroups of students. I use longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 in conjunction with longitudinal, student-level data from the North Carolina Education Data Re- search Center to employ a variation of a two sample instrumental variables approach in which I instrument for actual eighth grade absences with simulated measures of eight grade absences. I find consistent evidence that teacher reports of the atten- dance of low-income students are negatively biased and that math teacher reports of male attendance are positively biased. There is mixed evidence with regard to student race and ethnicity. The third essay is a co-authored effort in which we employ a quasi-experimental estimation strategy to examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state’s working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state’s eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employ- ment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important im- plications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.

Can vertically transmitted traits predict wealth inequality and, if so, how quickly do these traits influence wealth? I address these questions by exploiting differences in per-industrial rates of pastoralism between European-Americans and southeastern U.S. Indians to identify the role of vertically transmitted traits on the behavior of their descendants. I hypothesize that descendents of bi-racial marriages held different skills or preferences toward animal husbandry than descendents of homogamous (i.e., solely between Indians) marriages. To test this hypothesis, I use agricultural data from newly recovered agricultural censuses over the years 1894-1906 for the Cherokees living on the Eastern Band Reservation in North Carolina and link these data to three-generational genealogies of each head of household to these censuses. In the fully specifies model, I find that the accumulated holdings of livestock were 43 percent higher in Cherokee households with at least one European American ancestor than households with only Cherokee ancestors, even after controlling for religious and township-level fixed effects. Given the similar history of grain production in both societies, in the main falsification test, I find that the positive effect of European American ancestory on crop output is economically smaller and statistically different than the effect on livestock wealth.

Agriculture on the American Plains has been constrained historically by water scarcity. Post-WWII technologies enabled farmers over the Ogallala aquifer to extract groundwater for large-scale irrigation. Comparing counties over the Ogallala with nearby similar counties, groundwater access increased agricultural land values and initially reduced the impact of droughts. Over time, land-use adjusted toward water-intensive crops and drought-sensitivity increased. Viewed di erently, farmers in nearby water-scarce areas maintained lower-value drought-resistant practices that fully mitigate naturally-higher drought-sensitivity. The evolving impact of the Ogallala illustrates the importance of water for agricultural production, but also the large scope for agricultural adaptation to groundwater and drought.

Black women were more likely than white women to participate in the labor force from 1870 until at least 1980 and to hold jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. Differences in observables cannot account for most of this racial gap in labor force participation for the 100 years after Emancipation. This is consistent with racial differences in stigma associated with womens work, which Goldin (1977) hypothesized might be traced to cultural norms rooted in the prevalence of black womens labor under slavery. In both nineteenth and twentieth century data, we find evidence of inter-generation transmission of labor force participation from mother to daughter.

I present an integrated model of occupation choice, spouse choice, family labor supply, and fertility that unifies an extensive empirical literature on career and family and provides predictions on the relationship among career, family, and marriage market outcomes. Two key assumptions of the model are that occupations differ both in wages and in an amenity termed flexibility, and that children require a nontrivial amount of parental time that has no market substitute. When men and women face identical labor market conditions but women have an advantage in child care, men always have a higher return to entering the higher- earning occupation than women. Occupations with more costly flexibility, modeled as a nonlinearity in wages, have a lower fraction of women, less positive assortative mating on earnings, and lower fertility among dual-career couples. Costly flexibility may induce high- earning couples to share home production, which rewards husbands who are simultaneously high-earning and productive in child care. Empirical evidence broadly supports two main theoretical predictions: dual-career couples in occupations with less costly flexibility are more likely to have children, and professional women who achieve “career and family” in occupations with costlier flexibility are more likely to have husbands less educated than themselves.

We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those who changed to very popular American names like John or William, obtained gains in occupation-based earnings of at least 14%. We show that these estimates are causal effects by using an index of linguistic complexity based on Scrabble points as an instrumental variable that predicts name Americanization. We conclude that the tradeoff between individual identity and labor market success was present since the early making of modern America.

Although the working poor are a much larger population than the unemployed poor, American poverty research has devoted much more attention to joblessness than to working poverty. Research that does exist on working poverty concentrates on demographics and economic performance and neglects institutions. Building on literatures on comparative institutions, unionization, and states as polities, we examine the influence of a potentially important labor market institution for working poverty: the level of unionization in a state. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) for the U.S., we estimate: a) multi-level logit models of poverty among employed households in 2010; and b) two-way fixed effects models of working poverty across seven waves of data from 1991 to 2010. Further, we replicate the analyses with the Current Population Survey while controlling for household unionization, and assess unionization’s potential influence on selection into employment. Across all models, state-level unionization is robustly significantly negative for working poverty. The effects of unionization are larger than the effects of states’ economic performance and social policies. Further, unionization reduces working poverty for both unionized and non-union households and does not appear to discourage employment. We conclude that American poverty research can advance by devoting greater attention to working poverty, and by incorporating insights from the comparative literature on institutions.

В статье доказывается, что профессиональная структура населения может выступать индикатором этапа экономического развития, на котором находится страна. Показано, что современный тип хозяйственной системы промышленно развитых стран описывается фазой постиндустриального развития, которая характеризуется двумя главными показателями трудового потенциала: пропорциями в профессиональной структуре (преобладание профессиональных менеджеров и технических экспертов); характером труда, глубиной разделения труда по специализации и квалификации (высококвалифицированный труд при широкой специализации). Анализ статистики занятости в США и странах Западной Европы за последние 100-150 лет позволил определить пять основных стадий экономического развития и обозначить их ключевые особенности в соответствии с выделенными показателями.

The health effects of menstruation are a controversial explanation for gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings. This paper provides the first evidence on this issue using data that combines labor market outcomes with information on health. We find that menstrual problems could account for some of the gender gap in illness-related absences, but menstrual problems are associated with other negative health conditions, suggesting our estimates may overstate causal effects. Nevertheless, menstrual problems explain very little of the gender gap in earnings. in general, explain very little of gender gaps in full-time, full-year earnings.