Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory in a general-equilibrium Roy model in which preferences feature a subsistence food requirement. In the model, subsistence requirements induce workers that are relatively unproductive at agricultural work to nonetheless select into the agriculture sector in poor countries. When parameterized, the model predicts that productivity differences are roughly twice as large in agriculture as non-agriculture even when countries differ by an economy-wide efficiency term that affects both sectors uniformly.

The productive characteristics of migrating individuals, emigrant selection, affect welfare. The empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data. This paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues: the ENET (Mexican Labor Survey), which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non-migrants. This dataset presents a relevant dichotomy: it shows negative selection for urban Mexican emigrants to the United States for the period 2000-2004 together with positive selection in Mexican emigration out of rural Mexico to the United States in the same period. Three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested. Whereas higher skill prices in Mexico than in the US are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban Mexico, its combination with network effects and wealth constraints fully accounts for positive selection in rural Mexico.

This paper quantifies the impact of trade liberalization on wage inequality between workers of different skill levels and across age groups. I propose a model in which trade liberalization increases the demand for skill due to production share reallocation across firms and technology switching. However, unlike in existing literature, I endogenize the skill supply by supplementing the skill-demand side of the model to 2007 US data and simulate the economy's transition path in response to the removal of policy trade barriers. Workers have rational expectations and, therefore, must take into account the general-equilibrium effects on wages of changes in skill supply during the economy's transition. I find that the aggregate gains from trade liberalization, defined as the increase in discounted real earnings relative to their pre-liberalization level, are 5.9%. However, these gains are not distributed evenly among workers. For those alive at the time of implementation of the new trade policy, the oldest educated workers' discounted real lifetime earnings increase by 9.9%, while the oldest uneducated workers' discounted real lifetime earnings increase by only 1.5%. On the one hand, ignoring the economy's transition leads to an understatement of the trade-induced inequality as this fails to account for transitory inequality. On the other hand, ignoring the endogeneity of the skill supply leads to an overstatement of trade-induced inequality as this fails to account for the equalizing effect of the endogenous skill-supply adjustment.

The productive characteristics of migrating individuals, emigrant selection, affect welfare. The empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data. This paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues: the ENET (Mexican Labor Survey), which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non-migrants. This dataset presents a relevant dichotomy: it shows negative selection for urban Mexican emigrants to the United States for the period 2000-2004 together with positive selection in Mexican emigration out of rural Mexico to the United States in the same period. Three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested. Whereas higher skill prices in Mexico than in the US are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban Mexico, its combination with network sects and wealth constraints fully account for positive selection in rural Mexico.

Scholarly studies of immigration, religion, and race and ethnicity debate the role of religion in modern society, highlighting the salience of religion among post-1965 immigrants. In this dissertation, I explored the following question: How does religion shape Filipino immigrants` connection to the public sphere? To that end, I investigated: 1) How does religion shape immigrants` understanding of American citizenship? 2) How do immigrants constitute a sense of empowered citizenship via the civic and religious institutions they navigate? 3) Does religion act as a preserving force of traditional Filipino culture within American society? 4) To what extent does religion foster unique transnational ties to the homeland? Focusing on Filipino-Americans` stories and utilizing a humanistically-oriented sociological approach, I immersed myself in `lived religion` (McRoberts, 2004), engaged in participant observation, and conducted 60 in-depth interviews of Filipino-American adults in Virginia Beach, Virginia-one of the most highly populated Filipino areas on the East coast. I attended events at St. Gregory Catholic Church, the largest Filipino Catholic parish in the city, and the Filipino-American Community Action Group, the only local Filipino political organization. I also interviewed key leaders, including former Philippine president Fidel Ramos. Although religion encourages civic engagement, Filipino-Americans` political engagement is largely limited due to regionalism and the community associations that Filipino-Americans craft in the U.S. Catholicism reinforces regionalism via ethnic-specific Catholic practices like the celebration of patron saints who represent hometowns in the Philippines. Regionalism limits the ability of Filipino-Americans to collectively perceive themselves as `Filipino-American`, unify, and politically mobilize. However, civic organizations such as the Filipino American Community Action Group attempt to transcend regional differences, foster inter-ethnic pluralism, and establish a strong coalition of Filipino-Americans rather than organizing based on regional identities. The overwhelming majority of Filipino-Americans in this community immigrated and gained citizenship by way of the U.S. Navy. Because of this historical-American tie, most interviewees reported a strong sense of American nationalism and a sense of utang ng loob or `indebtedness` to the U.S. for their American citizenship. I hope to unravel the crucial role of religion and its relationship with immigrant integration, pluralism, race/ethnicity, and transnationalism through the lens of the religious and nonreligious experiences of post-1965 immigrants.

Individual inequality is growing in America today and the subject is of great interest. But spatial inequality how and why spatial context contributes to inequality (Labao et. al. 2007:3) -has just begun to be studied . If certain geographical areas are inherently richer due to accessibility, population size, or soils, for example, how much individual equality can a society hope to achieve? Furthermore, inequality due to spatial differences seems to endure over time (Labao and Hooks 2007:48; Peters 2012) and may be quite difficult to alter. This paper describes spatial inequality in wealth at the county level in the middle of the nineteenth century in the Northeastern US at a time when the US economy was growing rapidly and individual inequality was increasing. It applies Bayesian hierarchical spatial modeling in an attempt to understand the underlying causes of the differences in wealth between counties. The underlying spatial structure of inequality was rather different at this time: indeed, the urban agglomerations and industrial economy we know today were just coming into being. A unique feature of our work is the inclusion of a measure of soil quality that has not been used so far in either historical or contemporary investigations.

Many retail firms profess that they cannot afford to raise wages for their employees, let alone provide more generous benefits. But this economist finds that raising wages to $25,000 a year for full-time employees would increase the price for a retail product on average by only 15 cents.

This report provides estimates of the size of the March 2012 unauthorized immigrant population for the nation, as well as for the six states (California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas) where 60% of unauthorized immigrants live. For the nation, it also shows estimates of the size of the unauthorized immigrant population from Mexico and from all other countries. For the nation, the six states and the balance of the country, the report also includes annual estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population for 1995-2012 and an estimate for 1990. Estimates for those years at the national level also are provided for the unauthorized immigrant population from Mexico and all other countries.

During the 19th century, the US birthrate fell by half. While previous economic literature has emphasized demand-side explanations for this declinethat rising land prices and literacy caused a decrease in demand for childrenhistorians and others have emphasized changes in the supply of technologies to control fertility, including abortion and birth control. In this paper I exploit the introduction during the 19th century of state laws governing American womens access to abortion to measure the effect of changes in the supply of fertility technologies on the number of children born. I estimate an increase in the birthrate of 4 to 12% when abortion is restricted, which lies within the ranges of estimates found for the effect of fertility control supply restrictions on birthrates today. The importance of legal abortion in reducing 19th-century birthrates helps to account for a previously unexplained portion of the demographic transition. This paper posits that there has long been a demand, often unmet, for fertility control that should be considered in future demographic research as well as in policy formulation.

This paper presents evidence of spillovers from universities and examines the short- and long-run effects of university activities on geographic clustering of economic activity, labor market composition and local productivity. I treat the designation of land-grant universities as a natural experiment after controlling for the confounding factors with a combination of synthetic control methods and event-study analyses. Three key results are obtained. First, the designation substantially increases local population density. Second, the share of manufacturing workers in the population, an indicator of labor market composition, is not affected by the designation. Third, the designation greatly enhances local manufacturing productivity, as captured by local manufacturing output per worker, especially in the long run. This positive effect on the productivity in non-education sectors suggests the existence of spillovers from universities. Over an 80-year horizon, I estimate that most of the increase in manufacturing productivity is because of spillovers from university activities instead of agglomeration economies that arise from the concentration of population.

It has been well-documented that Americans have shifted towards eating out more and cooking at home less. However, little is known about whether these trends have continued into the 21st century, and whether these trends are consistent amongst low-income individuals, who are increasingly the target of public health programs that promote home cooking. The objective of this study is to examine how patterns of home cooking and home food consumption have changed from 1965 to 2008 by socio-demographic groups.

This analysis uses March Current Population Survey data from 1999 to 2010 and a differences-in-differences approach to examine how California's first in the nation paid family leave (PFL) program affected leave-taking by mothers following childbirth, as well as subsequent labor market outcomes. We obtain robust evidence that the California program doubled the overall use of maternity leave, increasing it from an average of three to six weeks for new motherswith some evidence of particularly large growth for less advantaged groups. We also provide evidence that PFL increased the usual weekly work hours of employed mothers of 1- to 3-year-old children by 10 to 17 percent and that their wage incomes may have risen by a similar amount.

This study updates what we know about the Great Recession’s impact on older unemployed Americans’ health and pre-retirement life by focusing on their wealth and income sources, health insurance access, poverty rates, unemployment duration, labor force drop-out rates, and Social Security claiming from 2009 through 2012 using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Current Population survey (CPS). All this information helps evaluate how unemployed older Americans have weathered the Great Recession of 2007, five years later. We also analyze whether older workers’ unemployment spells are structural in nature and we offer some solutions to this problem.

This report examines the Hispanic population of the United States by its 14 largest origin groups. The data for this report are derived from the 2011 American Community Survey (1% IPUMS), which provides detailed geographic, demographic and economic characteristics for each group. Accompanying this report are profiles of the 14 largest Hispanic-origin groupsMexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Spaniards, Hondurans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Argentineans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Also accompanying this report is an interactive graphic analyzing these groups on several characteristics.

For a very long time, a typical American family consisted of a working husband, a stay-at-home wife, and children. This traditional family was portrayed in popular TV dramas and sitcoms during the 1950s and 1960s, such as Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and represented what an ideal family looked like. Over time, especially since the 1970s, American families have been undergoing fundamental changes. The so-called traditional family is now much less common; the transformation of marriage as a social institution means that young adults today have many more options about partnering and parenting (Cherlin 2004). Some young Americans delay marriage and others forgo marriage altogether (Lichter and Qian 2004; McLanahan and Casper 1995). Unmarried cohabitation, which is typically a short-lived living arrangement, has emerged to be the initial coresidential choice among most young men and women. Marriage is no longer till death do us apart for all because divorce and separation have become commonplace. Over the life course, individuals experience more cohabitations, remarriages, and relationship disruptions (Cherlin 2004).

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and homecountry divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.

Using the three years of Alaskans in the American Community Survey integrated with the Urban Institute’s Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM), we estimated Medicaid/CHIP enrollment and costs under the ACA with and without an expansion of eligibility to 138 percent of the FPL. Comparing the two options— • Medicaid enrollment. In 2020, 172,900 nonelderly Alaskans would be enrolled in Medicaid with the expansion and 133,500 without it, a 30 percent increase. • State costs. In 2020—the first year in which the state would pay 10 percent of the costs of those made eligible by the Medicaid expansion—the state would spend $25 million more with the expansion than without it. Due to the low state contribution for the newlyeligible, this 3.7 percent increase in spending on the nonelderly is sufficient to support the 30 percent increase in enrollment. • Federal and state spending. From 2014 to 2020, there would be $1.1 billion more federal spending and $78 million more state spending on Medicaid in Alaska with the expansion than without it. These represent increases in Medicaid spending for the nonelderly of 18.5 percent and 1.9 percent respectively. • The uninsured. The ACA would reduce the uninsured rate in Alaska from 21% without the ACA to 10% under the ACA if the state participates in the Medicaid expansion, or 15% under the ACA without the expansion. • The report also includes a sensitivity analysis of Medicaid take-up rates, detailed characteristics of ACA Medicaid enrollees and their geographic distribution among five sub-state areas. • This report does not estimate offsetting savings to the state from sources such as reduced uncompensated care provided to the uninsured.