This paper empirically examines the educational selectivity of United States immigrants and of those that return to their source country. Data from the 1970 to 2000 U.S. Census and the 2010 American Community Survey are employed. Ten countries are selected for the study based on their historical and contemporaneous importance on U.S. migration. The results generally indicate positive selection on educational attainment of recently-arrived immigrants, being China, India, and Philippines the most prominent examples. Mexico does not show evidence of positive or negative selection, but their immigrants' selectivity has worsened through time. Historically, the educational selectivity of returning migrants accentuated the positive selection of those migrants that stay in the United States in most countries' cases. However, patterns of selection among migrants that stay have recently changed. A more detailed analysis with data from the last decade nds evidence of positive selection of immigrants staying in the U.S. for the Mexican and Philippines' case, as well as negative selection for the Chinese. Trends of returning migration are also analyzed by gender, age, naturalization status, and migration spell duration. Mixed evidence of selection trends is found.

We incorporate controls for cost of living in updated estimates of Hispanic-white wage gaps for men and women using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Conditional on pre-market skills (i.e., years of education and AFQT score) and cost of living, Hispanic men earn significantly lower hourly wages than non-Hispanic white men. The gap is concentrated among men with relatively low levels of educationhigh school degree or less. Conditional on pre-market skills, Hispanic women earn significantly higher wages than non-Hispanic white women, but the difference disappears after controlling for cost of living. We also show that non-immigrant Hispanics in the NLSY97 are rather representative of non-immigrant Hispanics in the U.S. overall (measured with the larger American Community Survey). However, immigrant Hispanics in the NLSY97 have higher levels of education and wages than the immigrant Hispanics in the ACS, even after restricting to those ACS respondents who have been in the U.S. since 1997. Researchers should take this limitation into account when extrapolating results for Hispanic immigrants in the NLSY97 to the Hispanic population as a whole.

The Age of Mass Migration from Europe to the New World (1850–1913) was one of the largest such episodes in human history. By 1910, 22 percent of the U.S. labor force was foreign born, compared to “only” 17 percent today. In a joint research program with Ran Abramitzky and Katherine Eriksson, I ask three related questions about this large and formative migrant flow: Were migrants who settled in the United States in the late nineteenth century positively or negatively selected from the European population? What was the economic return to this migration? And, how did these new migrants fare in the U.S. labor market, both upon first arrival and after spending some time in the country? A better understanding of the . . .

This paper uses data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) to review the trends of income inequality in the U.S. and to measure what role the different income sources play in explaining the variations in income inequality. This study shows that from 1994 to 2012, income inequality in total income rose significantly in the United States. This increase is explained by an increase in inequality for earned income, financial income, transfer income, and other incomes. The only income source for which the Gini coefficient fell is the retirement income. In addition, this study finds that earned income is the most important component explaining the observed increase in income inequality in the United States.

I was inspired to write Mixed Marriage . . . Interreligious, Interracial, Interethnic through my study of the Torah and its Mitzvot that prohibit certain mixed marriage while our greatest prophet (Moshe) and King David married outside the tribe. Moshe was Judaism's greatest prophet and lead his people out from Egyptian slavery. King David was Judaism's greatest King and the great-grandson from the mixed marriage of Ruth, the Moabitess and Boaz. The Messiah is prophesied to descend from King David as did Jeshua of Nazareth . . . the Christian Messiah.

What forces led to rapid recovery of the U.S. economy after 1933? Why was recovery derailed by a severe recession in 1937? Since Friedman and Schwartz (1963), economists have emphasized monetary explanations. This dissertation shows that in three crucial instances other factors mattered. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of using micro data to explore macro questions. The first chapter considers the effect of the 1936 veterans' bonus. Conventional wisdom has it that in the 1930s fiscal policy did not work because it was not tried. This chapter shows that fiscal policy, though inadvertent, was tried in 1936, and a variety of evidence suggests that it worked. A deficit-financed veterans' bonus provided 3.2 million World War I veterans with cash and bond payments totaling 2 percent of GDP; the typical veteran received a payment equal to annual per capita personal income. This chapter uses time-series and cross-sectional data to identify the effects of the bonus. I exploit four sources of quantitative evidence: a detailed household consumption survey, cross-state and cross-city regressions, aggregate time-series, and a previously unused American Legion survey of veterans. The evidence paints a consistent picture in which veterans quickly spent the majority of their bonus. Spending was concentrated on cars and housing in particular. Narrative accounts support these quantitative results. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the bonus added 2.5 to 3 percentage points to 1936 GDP growth. In my second chapter, I consider the causes of the severe recession that followed the boom year of 1936. The 1937-38 recession was one of the largest in U.S. history. Industrial production fell 32 percent and the nonfarm unemployment . . .

This paper studies the slow job market recovery in the U.S. after each post-1990 recession from a sectoral perspective. I establish the following six stylized facts using BLS establishment survey and IPUMS-CPS March data. (i) The U.S. job market has taken signi cantly longer to recover after each recession since 1990. (ii) Goods sector employment has been shrinking while service sector employment has been expanding. (iii) Relative employment growth in service changed from countercyclical to acyclical after 1990, but it remained procyclical in goods. (iv) The recovery of goods sector employment was slow after each post-1990 recession. (v) Educational attainment for service sector workers has surpassed that of goods sector workers since 1990. (vi) The skill premium of workers with college plus education has increased faster in service sector when compared to that in goods sector. The above-listed six facts indicate that the increasing educational barrier of sectoral labor reallocation is the major culprit behind post-1990 jobless recoveries.

This document provides thirteen economic facts on the growth of income inequality and its relationship to social mobility in America; on the growing divide in educational opportunities and outcomes for high- and low-income students and on the pivotal role education can play in increasing the ability of low-income Americans to move up the income ladder.

This paper presents research findings on the major risks to childrens development, the prevalence of those risks among disconnected families, and the potential consequences for children. We also describe potential interventions to help disconnected families by increasing and stabilizing family income, enhancing parenting skills, supporting children directly, and reaching out to disconnected mothers who are not citizens. Finally, we offer directions for future research.

The United States is home to a large and growing number of unauthorized immigrants. The most recent estimates indicate that this population increased from about 3 million in the late 1980s to around 11 million in 2009 (Passel and Cohn 2010). The legal immigrant population has also grown substantially over this time, as described in chapter 1 and throughout this volume, but the unauthorized immigrant population has grown at an even higher rate. Not surprisingly, the size and growth of the unauthorized population has not gone unnoticed and is the source of much controversy surrounding immigration policy. Reflected in both...

This report summarizes findings and recommendations from a convening, "Accelerating Change for Women Faculty of Color in STEM: Policy, Action, and Collaboration," that was designed to address the underrepresentation of women of color in STEM academic careers. The convening provided an opportunity for individuals who work in various sectors--including academia, government, corporations, and nonprofits--to share their experiences and knowledge about conditions for women of color in academic STEM careers and approaches that can facilitate their success and continued advancement. Speakers and participants addressed a range of topics, including current data illuminating the status of women of color in STEM, areas where progress has been made and places where it has stalled, as well as current initiatives to increase the representation of women of color in STEM faculty positions. They also discussed key areas of potential change (e.g., policy, institutions, and philanthropy) and actions that need to be taken within each area. The report concludes by summarizing recommendations for advocates, funders, and institutions to improve the status of women faculty of color in STEM. These recommendations include: (1) Advocacy Recommendations; (2) Recommendations for Improving Funding Opportunities; and (3) Recommendations for Improving Institutional Practices. Through more concerted, focused, and widespread efforts to accelerate progress for women faculty of color, the nation as a whole will advance its global leadership in STEM. The following are appended: (1) Figures and Tables by Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and STEM Discipline; (2) Advisory Committee; (3) Convening Participants; (4) Convening Agenda; and (5) Speaker Biographies.

Knowledge of pre-colonial Middle Eastern populations has been limited by the lack of data. The 1848 and 1868 Egyptian censuses provide two snapshots of the Egyptian population in its early attempts to make the transition into a modern society. These censuses are perhaps the earliest in the Middle East and among the earliest in any non-Western country to include individual-level information on all segments of the population, including females, children, and slaves, on a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic variables. This article describes the digitization of two nationally representative samples of the 1848 and 1868 censuses from the original manuscripts at the National Archives of Egypt. It then introduces an application of the samples in Egyptian economic history.

We provide the first evidence on the causal effect of border enforcement on the full spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants to the United States. We address the endogeneity of border enforcement with an instrumental variables strategy based on administrative delays in budgetary allocations for border security. We find that 1,000 additional border patrol officers assigned to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering a state decreases that states share of Mexican immigrants by 21.9%. Our estimates imply that border enforcement alone accounted for declines in the share of Mexican immigrants locating in California and Texas of 11 and 6 percentage points, respectively, over the period 1994-2011, with all other states experiencing gains or no change.

Critics of immigration reform worry about immigrants disproportionately consuming public benefits. Instead, they should support legal changes to immigrant welfare eligibility. Eliminating immigrant welfare eligibility for Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or food stamps), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, and other programs would, in the words of the Cato Institutes late Chairman Emeritus William Niskanen, build a wall around the welfare state, not around the country. Doing so would reduce immigrant welfare dependency and could increase the pace of intergenerational mobility among immigrants. Such measures would also be constitutional. This policy analysis shows how to implement those reforms.

Researchers have long been concerned that a new type of poverty is emerging in the United States: a class of people who dont work and instead are dependent on government income. Another, mostly separate, literature has documented the growth of bad jobs in the economy. In this paper, I take on both of those trends at once, using latent class analysis to look holistically at the structure of poverty in the United States between 1968 and 2012. I systematically describe the class structure at the bottom, identifying classes of people in terms of the level of their earnings, the quality and stability of the jobs they are able to find, their access to unearned income such as personal savings, whether they receive government income, and whether they depend on family or other roommates. I find that two classes grew in size over this period. The first is a class of non-workers who have virtually no attachment to work and depend on income from the government, or on roommates or other household members. The second is a class of unassisted struggling workers who have high attachment to work but often have bad jobs, and who receive little regular cash income from the government. Among the more advantaged classes, the old middle class with a strong attachment to work and high earnings, is giving way to an even more advantaged new middle class, even as the total number of people in the middle classes shrinks. I also find that the correlation between education and class membership has grown over time, with less educated people becoming more likely to be in one of the disadvantaged classes. These changes to the structure of poverty reflect the deindustrialization and polarization of the labor market that took place over this period. The big losses in routinized, mid-wage jobs left growing numbers of people marginalized either in the increasingly precarious lower tiers of the labor market or outside of the labor market altogether.

A legacy of research finds that marriage is associated with good health. Yet same-sex cohabitors cannot marry in most states in the United States and therefore may not receive the health benefits associated with marriage. We use pooled data from the 1997 to 2009 National Health Interview Surveys to compare the self-rated health of same-sex cohabiting men (n = 1,659) and same-sex cohabiting women (n = 1,634) with that of their different-sex married, different-sex cohabiting, and unpartnered divorced, widowed, and never-married counterparts. Results from logistic regression models show that same-sex cohabitors report poorer health than their different-sex married counterparts at the same levels of socioeconomic status. Additionally, same-sex cohabitors report better health than their different-sex cohabiting and single counterparts, but these differences are fully explained by socioeconomic status. Without their socioeconomic advantages, same-sex cohabitors would report similar health to nonmarried groups. Analyses further reveal important racial-ethnic and gender variations.

This report tries to put boundaries around the abstraction that is 'social inclusion'. It is intended for policy makers, academics, activists and development partners - indeed anyone who is curious about how to address inclusion in a world that is witness to intense demographic, spatial, economic and technological transitions. Placing the discussion of social inclusion within such global transitions and transformations, it argues that social inclusion is an evolving agenda. While it does not purport to provide definitive answers as to how to achieve social inclusion in any given context, the report offers an easy-to-use definition and a framework to assist practitioners in asking, outlining and developing some of the right questions that can help advance the agenda of inclusion in different contexts. There are seven main messages in this report: (1) Excluded groups exist in all countries; (2) Excluded groups are consistently denied opportunities; (3) Intense global transitions are leading to social transformations that create new opportunities for inclusion as well as exacerbating existing forms of exclusion; (4) People take part in society through markets, services, and spaces; (5) Social and economic transformations affect the attitudes and perceptions of people. As people act on the basis of how they feel, it is important to pay attention to their attitudes and perceptions; (6) Exclusion is not immutable. Abundant evidence demonstrates that social inclusion can be planned and achieved; (7) Moving ahead will require a broader and deeper knowledge of exclusion and its impacts as well as taking concerted action.

In spite of the rapid growth in job polarization literature, different aspects of job polarization across industries have not yet been studied extensively. In this paper, we show that (1) the degree of job polarization is not the same across different industries and that (2) this observation is related to interindustry wage differentials. In particular, we find that job polarization is more pronounced in industries which paid relatively higher wages than other industries since the early 1980s. We argue that this phenomenon can be explained as the dynamic responses of firms to interindustry wage differentials as shown by Borjas and Ramey (2000) : firms in industries with relatively higher industry wage premia respond by replacing workers with other production factors such as capital. As it is easiest for firms to replace 'middle occupation jobs' with certain types (Information, Communication, and Technology) of capital, labor demand declines disproportionately for firms with higher relative wages, which results in different aspects of job polarization across industries. * Preliminary and Incomplete. This version does not include model, which will be added later. We would like to thank Valerie Ramey for her insightful and helpful comments.

At several critical junctures in U.S. history, scholars and other commentators have become concerned that opportunities to get ahead may be growing more unequal, a hypothesis that was prominent during the Depression years, the postwar period, and then again in the 1950s (Hertzler 1952; Sibley 1942). Although these concerns have never been borne out, the recent takeoff in income inequality has revived them yet again (e.g., DeParle 2012; Foorohar 2001; Franke-Ruta 2012; The Economist 2010). We have strikingly little evidence on whether such concerns are finally warranted.The main goal of this paper is to eke out as much evidence on these concerns as the available data will allow. This descriptive objective might at first blush seem easily achieved. To the contrary, a host of methodological problems immediately emerge in attempting to establish recent trends in social mobility, not least of which is that the takeoff in income inequality has not been in play long enough to affect the upbringing of all that many current workers. It is equally problematic that the available survey samples are too small to reliably detect anything but the broadest trends. We overcome these obstacles in this paper by searching for trend among those age groups and social classes that are most likely to evince trend.