Conventional wisdom has it that in the 1930s fiscal policy did not work because it was not tried. This paper 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 paper 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 simple calculation suggests that the bonus added 2.5 to 3 percentage points to 1936 GDP growth.

Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty declaration is almost 50 years old. It is worth noting that since this declaration, various statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that the incidence of poverty among Blacks has persistently exceeded that of Whites (although the gap has narrowed). Since the early 1970s, when Hispanics started being consistently identified in mainstream national datasets, Hispanic poverty rates have also remained above the national average. These reported poverty discrepancies across racial/ethnic groups have predictably led social scientists to analyze socioeconomic and demographic factors associated with the likelihood of impoverishment. As recent examples, Mary J. Lopez (2013) and Pia Orrenius, Madeline Zavodny, and Yingda Bi (2011) suggest the proximate causes for the relatively high Hispanic poverty rates include lower levels of human capital, family structure, employment patterns, and immigration. To these, Lopez adds labor-market and housing discrimination.

Are an immigrant's decisions affected in real time by her home country's economy? I examine this question by exploiting exchange rate variations as exogenous price shocks to immigrants' budget constraints. I find that in response to a 10 percent dollar appreciation, an immigrant decreases her earnings by 0.92 percent, mainly by reducing hours worked. The exchange rate effect is greater for recent immigrants, married immigrants with absent spouses, Mexicans close to the border, and immigrants from countries with higher remittance flows. A neoclassical interpretation of these findings suggests that the income effect exceeds the cross-substitution effect. Remittance targets offer an alternative explanation.

How do technological progress and adoption of new technologies respond to changes in the availability of production factors? This paper attempts to answer this question in the context of US agriculture in the first three decades of the 20th century and its response to immigration-induced labor supply shocks at the local level. We estimate, using the location of past immigrants as instrument for the location choice of new immigrants, the impact of an increase in the number of farm workers per acre on crop choices, capital intensity and technology adoption at the county level using Census of Agriculture data. We find that larger immigrant flows led to slower adoption of labor-saving technologies, such as draft power, a decrease in farm size, an increase in the share of land cultivated by tenants and a shift towards more labor-intensive crops. At the same time, an increase in the number of workers per acre farmed in a particular country led the farms to a lower capital-labor ratio but to almost no changes in the capital-land ratio, even once accounting for changes in crop or tenure. These results suggest that capital over this period was complementary to land and labor, but much less for the latter. The results highlight the role of changes in output mix and in the organization of production as a mechanism to adjust to an influx of labor. However, suggestive evidence indicate that these adjustments in the output mix and in the organization of production did not fully absorb the increase in labor supply, implying that wages did fall, albeit less than without the effects we describe.

Objectives Latino immigrants continue to enter low-skilled urban labor markets across metropolitan areas in the United States. This study provides a dynamic account of the employment competition between Latino immigrant and black workers in the context of an emerging immigrant gateway: the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area. Methods This study identifies occupational niches that Latino immigrants and black workers heavily concentrate for years 1990, 2000, and 2008. Occupational-level composition and wage models are also estimated to test for the impact Latino immigration might have on black workers. Results Both black workers and Latino immigrant workers became increasingly concentrated in a few occupations between 1990 and 2008. While Latino immigrants have entered several historically black occupational niches, no downward pressure on the wage growth of blacks in the same occupation is observed. Conclusions As immigrants become increasingly clustered in manual-intensive craftsmen, operative, and farm occupations, blacks gravitate toward the better-paid and language-intensive sales, clerical, and service occupations, forming a segmented low-skill labor market. The reinforcement of their respective niches also tends to create closure to the other groups and intensify within-group competition.

In this paper, we generalize the Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) offshoring model to include numerous tasks/skill levels and then empirically investigate the effect of offshoirng on occupational employment for ten major occupational groups (at 2-digit SOC level) in the U.S. labor market using the CPSMORG (Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Groups) data from year 1983 to 2011. We first use the nonparametric monotonic cubic spline interpolation method to approximate offshoring cost functions. Results show that among the ten occupational groups, those involved with more impersonal and/or routine tasks have relatively lower offshoring costs in comparison to groups involved in more personal and/or non-routine manual tasks. Based on estimated offshoring costs, we then focus our analysis on five relatively more offshorable occupational groups to further calculate the number of jobs offshored as well as the offshoring percentage by occupation over the sample period. Results indicate: i) production occupations are most offshorable among all five offshorable occupational groups; ii) the offshoring percentage for production occupations has been increasing over time; and iii) offshoring percentages for professional occupations, management, business, and financial operations occupations have been decreasing over time.

This research adds the issue of heterogeneity within the married population to the literature of marital status and self-rated health via racial heterogamy as an example. I use 25 years of pooled data from National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), 1976-2010, from Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) to compare marital status differences in self-rated health among Non-Hispanic Blacks and Whites, with a concentrated concern on the role interracial marriage plays. The results show that when compared to the endogamous White, the interracially married are worse in overall health status, adjusted for all the controls. As for the difference between the interracially married and the unmarried, people in interracial marriage fare better in self-rated health than the divorced/widowed, even after all the controls are adjusted for. However, controlling for all other covariates, the interracially married show worse health than the widowed, and no difference than the single.

In addition to lower carbon dioxide emissions, policies to reduce fossil fuel combustion can yield substantial air quality co-benefits via reduced emissions of co-pollutants such as particulate matter and air toxics. If co-pollutant intensity (the ratio of co-pollutant impacts to carbon dioxide emissions) varies across pollution sources, efficient policy design would seek greater emissions reductions where co-benefits are higher. The distribution of co-benefits also raises issues of environmental equity. This paper presents evidence on intersectoral, intrasectoral and spatial variations in co-pollutant intensity of industrial point sources in the United States, and discusses options for integrating co-benefits into climate policy design to advance efficiency and equity.

Banking reformsthat reduced interest ratesboosted college enrollment rates among able students from middle class families. We define able students as those with learning aptitude scores in the top two-thirds of the U.S. population. We define middle class as families in which both parents are not highly-educated (above 12 years of education) and that are neither in the bottom fourth nor in the top 10 percent of the distribution family income in the U.S. Our findings suggest that credit conditions, the ability of an individual to benefit from college, and a familys financial and educational circumstances combine to shape college decisions. The functioning of the financial system plays a powerful role in shaping the degree to which a childs educational choicesand hence economic opportunitiesare defined by parental income.

This paper analyzes the long run welfare effects of immigration in a model endogenous technological change. Existing theoretical models predict that immigration with depress the wages. However, empirical literature finds that immigration effect on wages is either positive or insignificant. In order to match the theory with these empirical findings, I embed endogenous technological change in a model similar to Auerbauch and Kotlikoff (1987). The results show that the standard model underestimates the effect of immigration to native unskilled workers by 31%. Comparing the fiscal effects of immigration in terms of burden of an immigrant through net present discount value (NPV) calculations existing models overestimate NPV of an additional low skilled immigrant approximately by 35% and underestimate the value of an additional high skilled immigrant by 15%.

Hanna Rosin has written that she “hesitate[s] to get drawn into data wars” (and suggested my blog to those readers who have “an appetite for them”).1 Statistics, however, are not mere technical details, academic in the pejorative sense. They are reflections of reality – numbers that represent characteristics of a sample which, if done right, reflect the population from which the sample is drawn. It is in the broad sense of measuring reality, not the narrow sense of quibbling over details at the nth decimal place, that the “end of men” is not true. Rosin’s depiction of reality is not accurate. While her prominent 2010 article in The Atlantic2 launched the “end-ofmen” phenomenon, it was only later, while watching her TED Talk,3 that I realized the scale of the problem. Many of the facts offered in that talk were either wrong or misinterpreted to exaggerate the looming . . .

We focus on short, intermediate, and longer-term policies that might improve the economic prospects of low-income households. In the short-run, what they most need is jobs. In the intermediate term, even if they were employed, many of them would not earn enough to support a family unless their wages were boosted by programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or a higher minimum wage. In the longer-term, they need better education and stronger families. Accordingly, we look at each of these four paths to moving more low-income households into the middle class, showing what each might achieve based on new estimates of the impact of each strategy on annual earnings.

Late nineteenth century Ontario was market by great wealth inequality as evidenced from census-linked probate data for the years 1892 and 1902. The average wealth of decedents reporting an average wealth pf $169,415 and the bottom one percent an average of $43. Compared to the United States, Britain, or even new settler economies such as Argentina or Australia, Ontario seems curiously bereft of larger supercharged estates more characteristic of the age of the Robber Barons. This leads to the natural question: where are the wealth extremes and great fortunes of late nineteenth century Ontario? Explanations explored include a slower rate of economic growth, predominance of Montreal rather than Toronto as an economic center, and migration of Canadians to pursue opportunities in the United States. it is not that nineteenth century Canada did not generate rich people, it did not hang on to them in the long run thereby generating perceptions of a shortage of rich people in Canada that persist to present.

Community gardens have been proposed as a solution to combat the ongoing and escalating food desert problem in low-income communities. As planners, community leaders and residents look to implement this solution and convert vacant property into gardens they need to be aware of the potential conflicts that can arise when the area starts to develop. This paper offers an analysis tool and uses it to determine vacant sites that are appropriate for community gardens in a particular South Dallas neighborhood that do not conflict with the future development of the area. It also identifies the grocery store gap in the area. Finally the paper provides policy recommendations to both guide the conversion of vacant parcels to community gardens and attract grocery store development.

This briefing paper examines the problem of the low rate of American Indian employment and outlines strategies to address it. Part I examines American Indian employment rates, the Native Americanwhite employment rate gap nationally and by state, and possible causes of this gap. There is also some exploratory analysis of employment rates by tribe. Part II consists of policy recommendations for increasing American Indian employment.

Identifying the effects of political endorsements has historically been difficult. Before the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. In this article, we assess the impact of this endorsement using, as measures of Winfreys influence, subscriptions to her magazine and sales of books she recommends. We find that her endorsement increased Obamas votes and financial contributions, and also increased overall voter turnout. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and previous elections, nor with underlying political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfreys endorsement was responsible for approximately 1 million additional votes for Obama.

In the case of the unemployment benefits program, I analyze its effects on the behavior of employed workers rather than on unemployed individuals. I find evidence in Chapter I that, for older workers in the US, an increase in the potential replacement rate provided by unemployment benefits results in a decrease in the probability of searching on the job, which leads to a decrease in the probability of experiencing a job-to-job transition and an increase in the probability of transitioning into a jobless spell. The sizes of the estimated effects are larger for workers in downsizing firms. This finding is supported by the theoretical framework developed in my dissertation, which indicates that unemployment benefits would have stronger effects on the decisions of workers who are at higher risk of job loss.

Financial literacy and cognitive capabilities are convincingly linked to the quality of financial decision-making, influencing savings, stock-picking, and avoidance of outright financial mistakes. Yet, there is little evidence that education intended to improve financial decision-making is successful. Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to state-mandated personal finance and mathematics training in high school, affecting millions of students, this paper answers the question "Can good financial behavior be taught in high school?" It can, though not via personal finance courses, which we find have no effect on financial outcomes. Instead, we find additional training in mathematics leads to greater financial market participation, more investment income, and better credit management, including less bankruptcy and fewer foreclosures.