This chapter discusses the number of working opportunities that are available to minorities in Britain and the United States, and studies the prospects which minorities have of finding (good) work and how often they are able to have successful careers. It studies detailed data taken from the national census that shows how minorities fare compared to the white majority and how the chances of getting ahead in the workplace differ between various minority groups.

Income inequality between races has been a widely used indicator of economic prosperity and opportunity (or the lack thereof) within the diverse population of the U.S. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal, thus improving the quality of education and providing more job opportunities for African-Americans. Nevertheless, disparities remain. Labor economists have investigated various sources of earnings inequality in America since the act was passed; some economists have considered how the disparities in earnings change within and across regions of the country. Much of the research covers the 1960-2000 period; much less is known about racial inequality in earnings over the years since. Of particular interest might be the impact of the Great Recession on such inequality.

A recently growing body of literature has linked the ongoing increase in U.S. wage inequality in last three decades to the job and wage polarization processes. In this paper, we test how much of these employment and wage structure shifts can be ex- plained by the routinization hypothesis alone over the period 1981-2011. We do this in an incomplete markets environment with heterogeneous agents. Incomplete markets and the resulting saving behavior enable us to establish the missing link between job polarization literature and wealth inequality and also to introduce a simple mechanism of educational choice. Our model economy shows that routinization hypothesis alone accounts for a signiÖcant portion of the increase in employment share of high skill occupations and their relative wages, as well as the increase in the supply of labor with a college equivalent degree. The model has also been successful in explaining the erosion of wealth in the middle of wealth distribution, thereby indicating the role that might have been played by job and wage polarization on the recently discussed phenomenon of middle class squeeze. On the other hand, the model fails to generate the growth in the share of low skill occupations. Preliminary results show that a two- sector version of the model is remarkably more promising in generating the shifts in both employment and wage structures over the past three decades.

Todays adult workers need a broader and stronger set of skills than they have in the past, and they must continually update their skills if they are to adapt to rapidly evolving technologies and industries. Literacy skillsincluding reading, writing, numeracy, and computer skillsare the foundational skills workers need to respond to this changing environment. And soft skills, including social skills and work habits, are becoming increasingly important as many jobs require direct interactions with consumers or teamwork to solve complex problems. Two recent studies from the Brookings Institution found that there is a gap between the skills required by jobs (including job openings) in the New Orleans metro and the skills supplied by the metro labor pool. Improvement of K-12 education is essential in addressing this problembut will take decades to fully take effect. For example, in New Orleans, even if theres a significant in-migration of young professionals, fully two-thirds of the citys 2025 labor pool will be adults who are already working-age New Orleanianswell past the reach of K-12 schools.The best available data suggests that 27 percent of New Orleans current working-age population are low-skilled and likely low-literate. While New Orleans has a smaller share of low-skilled working-age adults than cities like Memphis and Detroit, New Orleans has a significantly larger share of low-skilled adults than cities like Raleigh and Washington, D.C.Meanwhile, the New Orleans regional economy continues to shift toward knowledge-based industries with middle- and high-skilled jobs projected to account for over half of all job openings by 2020. Strengthening and targeting workforce development efforts toward current job openings and growth industries will be key to reducing the regions current and future skills gap. High level economic development leadership can bring together employers in emerging industry clusters with education institutions, training providers, support service providers, and Workforce Investment Boards to identify and solve specific workforce challenges. Importantly, these industry-led alliances can advocate for new ways to make use of a broader range of funding streams to accomplish their goals. With shrinking government coffers, it will take pooling of more flexible dollars to address workforce training needs. Importantly, this work will require a sustained leadership commitment, because there are no quick fixes. Other regions have recognized the importance of making workforce skill building among their highest priorities with impressive results. There is no doubt that New Orleanians, working together, can accomplish the same.

Scientists, Technology professionals, Engineers and Mathematicians (STEM workers) are the fundamental inputs in scientific innovation and technological adoption which, in turn, the main drivers of the productivity growth in the US. During the last thirty years productivity growth appeared to be "college" biased, in that it increased demand and productivity of college educated much more than that of other workers. In this paper we identify STEM workers in the US and we look at the effect of their growth on the growth of wages and employment of college and non-college educated in 219 US cities during the period 1990-2010. In order to identify a supply-driven and heterogenous increase in STEM workers across US cities we use the "dependence" of each city on foreign-born STEM workers in 1980 (or 1970) and we exploit the introduction and the variation (over time and across nationalities) of the H1B visa program directed specifically to allow access into the US to professional STEM workers.We find that H1B-driven increases in STEM workers in a city were associated with significant increases in wages of college educated natives, (in general as well as STEM). Non-college educated natives, instead, experienced non significant effects on their wages and on their employment. We also find evidence that STEM workers increased the price of housing for college graduates and the specialization in high human capital sectors and high cognitive occupations in US cities. The magnitudes of these estimates imply that STEM workers contributed significantly to total factor productivity growth in the US and across cities and also, but to a lesser extent, to the growth of the skill biased during the 1990-2010 period.

David White surveys a set of recent studies that examine how religion factors into the lives of young Americans age 18 to 23, a group that has come to be known as emerging adults. This research provides insight into why one in three emerging adults are not affiliated with any religious community. This article is the second of four articles that will appear on this website concerning a research initiative on Youth and Religion that the Religion division of the Lilly Endowment has funded.

Este trabajo analiza si la aglomeración de capital humano en los municipios de Colombia genera beneficios sociales en términos de mayores oportunidades laborales, por medio del empleo de datos censales de 1993 y 2005. Los resultados muestran que la tasa de empleo es, en promedio, más alta en los municipios con una mano de obra más calificada que en aquellos municipios con una mano de obra poco calificada. La literatura ofrece, al menos, tres explicaciones para este resultado: las externalidades de capital humano, las complementariedades de producción y las externalidades de consumo. Para distinguir entre estas, se analiza el efecto de un aumento en la oferta de mano de obra calificada en la tasa de empleo de individuos con diferentes niveles de educación. Los resultados sugieren que dicho aumento tiene un efecto positivo en la tasa de empleo de individuos que no terminaron la secundaria o la primaria.

This paper finds evidence of positive neighborhood effects on adult labor market outcomes using the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment. Our results stand in such sharp contrast to the current literature because our analysis focuses on outcomes of the subpopulation induced by the program to move to a higher quality neighborhood, while previous analyses have focused on outcomes of either the entire population or the subpopulation induced by the program to move. We propose and implement a new strategy for identifying heterogeneous transition-specific effects that exploits the identification of the idiosyncratic component of an ordered choice model. We estimate Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs) of the change in quality most commonly induced by MTO vouchers, between the first and second deciles of the national distribution of neighborhood quality. Although MTO vouchers induced much larger changes in neighborhood quality than standard Section 8 vouchers, these LATEs only pertain to a subpopulation representing under 10 percent of program participants.

This paper explores the relationship between ethnic competition and complementarity in returns to self-employment. We use detailed individual data from the U.S. censuses. We find that while in general business competition is detrimental to profitability, higher self-employment concentrations of co-ethnics are associated with increase in returns.

New Yorkers are getting older and almost half of the citys older adults are immigrants. While the city has taken initial steps to plan for this rapidly diversifying population, not nearly enough attention has been paid to this particularly vulnerable subset of the citys seniors.

The data show that the decline of state banks was not simply due to their adoption of national charters. Instead, nearly a third closed permanently between 1863 and 1870. The regressions indicate that the legislation's high capital requirements prevented national banks from operating in rural areas, whereas the bank note tax drove the remaining small state banks out of business. The result was a loss of banks in agricultural areas and an accumulation of banks in industrial ones. The new national banks also do not seem to have been created by displaced state bankers, but rather, the legislation encouraged note and security brokers to obtain bank charters by eliminating the need for note trading and discounting

As jobs in the United States become less secure and traditional job ladders deteriorate, employees increasingly change employers to build their career. This article explores how this shift affects gender earnings disparities. I find that the effect of changing employers depends on whether changes occur in good or bad jobs and whether individuals leave voluntarily or involuntarily. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics 1979-2009, gender disparities narrowed among voluntary leavers in good jobs and involuntary leavers in bad jobs. Disparities stagnated among voluntary leavers in bad jobs. The gender gap actually increased among involuntary leavers in good jobs. Although the causal mechanisms driving these trends are still unknown, the results indicate that the externalization opens opportunities primarily to those who are already in good positions.

We investigate the role of complementarities in production and skill mobility across cities. We propose a general equilibrium model of location choice by heterogeneously skilled workers, and consider different degrees of complementarities between the skills of workers. The nature of the complementarities determines the equilibrium skill distribution across cities. We prove that with extreme-skill complementarity, the skill distribution has fatter tails in large cities; with top-skill complementarity, there is first-order stochastic dominance. Using the model to back out skills from wage and housing price data, we find robust evidence of fat tails in large cities. Big cities have big inequality. This pattern of spatial sorting is consistent with extreme-skill complementarity: the productivity of high skilled workers and of the providers of low skilled services is mutually enhanced.

The passage of the National Banking Acts stabilized the existing financial system and encouragedthe entry of 729 banks between 1863 and 1866. The national banks not only attracted more depositsthan previous state banks, but also concentrated in the area that would eventually become the ManufacturingBelt. Using a new bank census, the paper shows that these changes to the financial system were a majordeterminant of the geographic distribution of manufacturing. The sudden entry not only resulted inmore manufacturing capital and output at the county-level, but also more steam engines and valueadded at the establishment-level.

Atlanta, Georgia experienced a spike in its residential burglary rate in 2008, peaking at nearly twenty-four and a half percent above the rate of 2007. This study identifies clusters of residential burglaries in Atlanta, temporal frequencies of the crimes and analyzes potential environmental factors that increased criminal activity using a mixed methods approach. A series of quantitative analyses focused on clusters of reported residential burglaries across twelve police beats, spanning both urban and suburban regions of Atlanta. Regression analyses and kernel density tests suggested strong relationships between burglary rates and the socio-economic conditions and neighborhood types in Atlanta. Additional qualitative approaches revealed important environmental attributes influencing the frequency of crime trends and patterns, including neighborhood design and land use. Design elements such as cul-de-sacs, curvilinear streets, and reduced access points appeared to lower rates of burglary, whereas locations with grid-patterned streets experienced higher burglary rates. Furthermore, proximity to schools and railway yards were identified as having a negative impact on burglary rates. Temporal patterns of burglary were found to be consistent across the study area.

This article studies the determinants of the labor force participation of the elderly and investigates the factors that may account for the increase in retirement in the second half of the last century. We develop a lifecycle general equilibrium model with endogenous retirement that embeds Social Security legislation and Medicare. Individuals are ex ante heterogeneous with respect to their preferences for leisure and face uncertainty about labor productivity, health status and out-of-pocket medical expenses. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy in 2000 and is able to reproduce very closely the retirement behavior of the American population. It reproduces the peaks in the distribution of Social Security applications at ages 62 and 65 and the observed facts that low earners and unhealthy individuals retire earlier. It also matches very closely the increase in retirement from 1950 to 2000. Changes in Social Security policy – which became much more generous – and the introduction of Medicare account for most of the expansion of retirement. In contrast, the isolated impact of the increase in longevity was a delaying of retirement.

Space and time frame all aspects of the discipline of geography. Integration is normally interpreted by geographers as a straddling of the environmentalsocial divide, but a more profound interpretation stresses the issues involved in coupling environmental and social processes: a science of integration rather than an integration of sciences. Seven examples of distinct data types and scientific questions are examined, leading to the conclusion that a spacetime geographic information system is unlikely to emerge in the near future. Instead, attention should focus on the systematic study of the issues involved in integration through the formal environment of a computational system.

In the United States, race and ethnicity are considered key social determinants of health because of their enduring association with social and economic opportunities and resources. An important policy and research concern is whether the U.S. is making progress toward reducing racial/ethnic inequalities in health. While race/ethnic disparities in infant and adult outcomes are well documented, less is known about patterns and trends by race/ethnicity among children. Our objective was to determine the patterns of and progress toward reducing racial/ethnic disparities in child health. Using nationally representative data from 1998-2009, we assessed 17 indicators of child health, including overall health status, disability, measures of specific illnesses, and indicators of the social and economic consequences of illnesses. We examined disparities across five race/ethnic groups (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic Asian, and non-Hispanic other). We found important racial/ethnic disparities across nearly all of the indicators of health we examined, adjusting for socioeconomic status, nativity, and access to health care. Importantly, we found little evidence that racial/ethnic disparities in child health have changed over time. In fact, for certain illnesses such as asthma, black-white disparities grew significantly larger over time. In general, black children had the highest reported prevalence across the health indicators and Asian children had the lowest reported prevalence. Hispanic children tended to be more similar to whites compared to the other race/ethnic groups, but there was considerable variability in their relative standing.