This paper analyzed the effect of immigration on wages taking into account human capital and labor supply adjustments. Using U.S. microdata for 1967-2007, I estimate a labor market equilibrium model that includes endogenous decisions on education, participation, and occupation, and allows for skill-biased technical change. Results suggest important labor market adjustments that mitigate the effect of immigration on wages. These adjustments include career switches, labor market detachment and changes in schooling decisions, and are heterogenous across the workforce. The adjustments generate substantial self-selection biases at the lower tail of the wage distribution that are corrected by the estimated model.

Spatial science is a fast-growing field that studies spatiotemporal aspects of people, places, and processes using information technologies. It encompasses technologies ranging from satellite imaging and geographic information systems (GIS) to spatial data and models of data derived from social networks and fieldwork. Key research agencies—including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States—have targeted spatial science for dramatically increased funding. Scientific bodies, including the U.S. National Academies and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, herald spatial science as an integrative approach and a research topic of vital importance to a wide array of disciplines encompassing Latin Americanists. Importantly, these agencies point to a need for better spatial science infrastructure, including physical systems centered on computing and communication as well as scientific data standards for archiving, discovery, and dissemination.

Life expectancy at birth in the United States (both sexes combined) rose from 70 years in 1965 to nearly 78 years in 2007. While this is a new milestone for low mortality among Americans, the United States lags significantly behind countries in Western Europe. Especially after age 50, mortality in the US remains substantially higher than in countries with similar levels of economic development, an unfavorable trend that has emerged in the past few decades (Crimmins, Preston, and Cohen 2010).1 Despite spending more per capita on health care than any other peer country, the health performance of the United States is comparatively poor, especially among older adults aged 50 to 80 (Ho and Preston 2010). A recent National Academy of Sciences panel was charged with identifying why US adult mortality is so high relative to its peers (Crimmins, Preston, and Cohen 2010). Although a number of causes were identified, the relatively poor health status of the United States remains a problem that American health policy has not sufficiently addressed.

Following two decades of Mexican migration to the southern United States, the second generation is entering the labor market. We analyze the early occupational careers of fifty-eight second-generation young adults in Dalton, Georgia, a global carpet-manufacturing center. We find intergenerational occupational mobility, with children of Mexican immigrants deploying human-capital skills to access better jobs than their parents. However, the Mexican second generation faces opportunity ladders structured along gender lines, with women working in services and men laboring as bilingual supervisors and crew leaders in the carpet industry. While bilingual skills play a critical role in the employment paths that members of the second generation have started to chart, their use of bilingualism is also shaped by gender dynamics in the workplace.

We evaluate the economic significance of linguistic barriers to communication in 226 US cities from 1980 to 2000 to test for the 'paradox of diversity', namely, whether knowledge exchange is inhibited by linguistic barriers to communication across social groups. We find: one, linguistic and cultural diversity increases the average income of the working age population; and two, the higher is the proportion of the foreign-born population in a city not fluent in English, the smaller is the economic benefit of diversity. The results provide valuable insights as to how the economic benefits of diversity can enhance wealth within cities. J

This research brief presents initial results from the newlyreleased California Poverty Measure (CPM). The CPM, which is jointly produced by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, is our best estimate of economic disadvantage across and within California. It improves on the official poverty measure (OPM) and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) in ways that will be discussed in some detail below. The CPM can be used to provide county-level estimates of poverty, to explore how current policy is affecting poverty rates, and to examine the potential impact of certain proposed changes in policy. Because California will be facing key decisions in the future about how to address poverty, we need to be able to assess how proposed changes in its safety net will affect Californians. The CPM is a partial but important step in that direction. We address five questions in this brief: (1) How much poverty is there in California and how do estimates of poverty vary across the main competing measures of poverty? (2) Does poverty vary much across California counties? (3) How do patterns of poverty vary by demographic characteristics? (4) By how much do social safety net programs reduce poverty rates? And (5) Which demographic groups benefit the most from safety net programs? This brief provides only some of the key results coming out of the CPM and focuses particularly on demographic and countylevel variability in poverty. For more information about the CPM, including a detailed discussion of the impacts of the safety net, the depth of poverty, and other key findings, see our companion publication and technical appendices (available at www.ppic.org/ main/publication.asp?i=1070).

Recent electoral research has claimed that individuals in the United States are self-segregating along political lines. In this paper, I use the Twin Cities, Minnesota, metropolitan area as a case study to test for the presence of political segregation through statistical and spatial analyses of electoral data from 1992 to 2012. I find that while segregation by partisan voting at the individual level is comparatively low, it has increased during the study period, and there exists substantial spatial clustering in voting patterns at aggregate levels. These distinct electoral divides between central city and exurb suggest spatial sorting of the electorate in the metropolitan area.

This paper evaluates the impact of eliminating affirmative action in California in postsecondary admission during 1995. Using methodology of difference-indifferences , I compare the university enrollment of minority in California with other states that did not eliminate affirmative action in 1990s. In contrast with the expectation, eliminating affirmative action does not reduce the enrollment of minority students. Research on outcomes by school types does not provide a clear support that fewer minorities enrolled in public schools. Result in labor market also fails to find evidence proving that minority are worse off in earnings after eliminating affirmative action. 2 In 1960, the term "affirmative action" firstly existed in a series orders in response to Civil Rights movement. Affirmative action (AA thereafter) is intended to promote the opportunity of minority group and compensate past discrimination by erase differences between races. In education and labor markets, race is broadly taken into account when the decision of admission, employment or payment is made. One extreme case is quota that sets a particular enrollment (or employment) number for each race. But quota is illegal in United States. There are two main area of adoption of AA-education and labor market. In this paper, I focus on the effect of AA on higher education, especially on school enrollment of minorities. In labor market, most people agree that employers have prejudice and discrimination on minorities. But in education, equity across races is always an important mission. Some even argue that affirmative action overprotects minorities so that produces environment of reverse discrimination. In 1990s, California firstly eliminated affirmative action in higher education admission. Some believe minorities were harmed by the change of law. Some support the policy and think it brings more fairness and better match for students. Nevertheless, most arguments concentrate on administrative data from specific schools. Some other research regards behaviors change in college selection. The purpose of my study is to explore the change of the well-beings of minorities after AA was ended. In this paper, I generalize the argument to the entire states and broaden the topic to two more general outcomes-college enrollment and earnings. By a study of the impact of eliminating AA on a macro-level to see what the effect on postsecondary school enrollment and future earnings of minorities, I conclude that negative effect of elimination of AA is not so serious as people worried. Conducting the methodology of "difference-in-differences", I compare the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics before and after the law was enacted, and detect 3 the difference between the earnings of the minorities who are and not affected by the policy change. The rest of paper is recognized as follows. Section I introduces background information and Section II reviews previous literature. Section III describes data sources and potential limitations. In section IV, I present the empirical strategy of my research and the result with sensitivity test. Labor market outcomes are provided in Section V. Section VI discusses and concludes.

Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using time-series cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor’s share of income, increasing top executives’ share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. Net of conventional explanations such as deunionization, globalization, technological change, and capital investment, the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financialization could account for more than half of the decline in labor’s share of income, 9.6% of the growth in officers’ share of compensation, and 10.2% of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008.

This paper discusses links among three familiar developments in US housing markets over the last quarter century: ongoing "sprawl" of housing units away from dense locations toward suburbs, federal support for homeownership, and low consumer price inflation and interest rates.

Spatio-temporal information (e.g. time, location, person and event) recorded in detail in vast Chinese historical books can provide evidence about the movement of entities (e.g. people, family, army and weapons) and their underlying spatial behaviours. Furthermore, this information largely reflects the process of social development, which makes it valuable to both professional research and public awareness. However, this information cannot be easily expressed and visually utilized because it is often hidden in the text of historical books. Aiming to better realize the potential value of such abundant information derived from historical books and bridging the gap between historical research and geographic space, a feasible and appropriate approach is explored in this article, to guide the transforming process from historical books to historical maps. The hope is that providing the scenarios of historical events will benefit related historical and social research. First, the integral framework of the approach was introduced, and the detail of building the specific spatio-temporal framework for information matching was discussed. Based on the spatio-temporal framework, the specification for the representation of historical books was designed. By extracting the spatio-temporal data from historical books, organizing them according to the specification and matching them with the spatio-temporal framework, the scenarios of historical events in the book (e.g. wars, migration, diseases, natural disasters, mass movement, etc.) can be visually transformed into historical maps. As the most critical writing of the Chinese Twenty-Four Histories, the Records of the Grand Historian (also known as Shiji) was employed as an example to test the proposed approach.

In 2010, the long form Decennial Census was not used for the first time in several decades, replaced instead by the American Community Survey (ACS). While the ACS has been collecting data for more than a decade, the first census tract results were released in 2010. The ACS collects its data based on a rolling sample. It is purported to have many advantages over the Decennial Census, including frequently updated data, less overall cost, and better coverage. We have found, however, that the ACS can produce highly inaccurate data, in part because of reliance on extremely small samples in sparsely populated neighborhoods. We explore these dynamics through a community survey which replicates ACS questions while employing the old Decennial Census long form sampling strategy of requesting information from one in six households in a single inner city census tract in Nashville, Tennessee. Our results show that the ACS has grossly underestimated the total population and the number of people living in poverty in the neighborhood, among other variables of interest. Through an examination of the number of census tracts with very small sample sizes and a comparison of recent ACS results with the 2010 Decennial Census, we show that the problems identified in this single tract occur throughout the country. In addition, we consider how statistical profiles of neighborhoods derived from the ACS and other data sources enable wide ranges of action in those neighborhoods, action which can be harmful given inaccurate and/or decontextualized data.

This paper examines the effect of General Purpose Technologies on the labor market. It provides a theoretical contribution in the context of computers since the 1980s and an empirical contribution in the context of electricity in the 1930s. First, the paper presents a model where the adoption of computers explains both structural and cyclical changes of the US labor market in recent decades. When computers become cheap and competitive compared to workers, they diffuse more rapidly and become more important in the conventional mechanism of capital-labor substitution. The model can account for recent structural changes with this trend of automation: employment has shifted away from routine occupations and the labor share of income has declined. The model also predicts that recessions accelerate this trendfirms prefer to destroy routine jobs during a downturn, when the opportunity cost of restructuring is low. This acceleration can account for recent cyclical changes of the labor market: routine job losses are concentrated in recessions and the ensuing recoveries are jobless. To show causal evidence for the model, the second contribution is to consider the General Purpose Technology of electricity with a newly digitized plant-level dataset for the concrete industry between 1929 and 1935. Unlike computers, electricity prices vary across space depending on the power sourcehydro power or coal power. Using geography as an instrument for shifts in the electricity supply curve, this paper finds that the decrease in the price of electricity caused a decrease in the labor share of income, consistent with the predictions of the model.

In response to the dramatic rise in the number of unauthorized immigrants to the United States, every state has passed some form of immigration legislation. These laws appear to be predicated on a belief that unauthorized immigrants impose greater costs than benefits to state and local communities, including the labor market. The purpose of this paper is to examine some evidence on what workers should expect if the immigration legislation is successful in eliminating undocumented workers from states' labor markets.

This study analyzes trends and determinants of the height of men born in the 100 largest American urban areas during the second half of the nineteenth century and compares them with heights of the rural population. In this sample of 21,704 US Army recruits, there is an urban height penalty of up to 0.58 in. (1.5 cm). An increment in urban population of 100,000 is associated with a height decrease of about 0.31 in. (0.8 cm). Urban heights declined after 1855 followed by stagnation until the early 1890s, whereas rural heights stagnated from the late 1840s until 1885. Urban recruits from the northeast were 0.46 in. (1.2 cm) shorter than urban Mid- western recruits. There is some evidence of a height convergence between large and small cities toward the end of the century and of an inverted U-shaped relationship between height and city size. Urban heights were positively correlated with the extent of the railroad network, the real wage rate in the manufacturing sector, and high socioeconomic status, while they were negatively correlated with the death rate, and the percentage of the city’s population employed in manufacturing.

Poverty rates are particularly high among households headed by single women, and childbirth is often the event preceding these households poverty spells. This paper examines the relationship between legal access to the birth control pill and female poverty. We rely on exogenous cross-state variation in the year in which oral contraception became legally available to young, single women. Using census data from 1960 to 1990, we find that having legal access to the birth control pill by age 20 significantly reduces the probability that a woman is subsequently in poverty. We estimate that early legal access to oral contraception reduces female poverty by 0.5 percentage points, even when controlling for completed education, employment status, and household composition.

Grandparents over the age of 65 who are raising grandchildren are a small but extremely vulnerable population in California. These older adults usually become the primary caregivers of their grandchildren after an unexpected event. They are further faced with the financial challenge of having an additional dependent without additional income. This policy brief documents that the actual income needed to support a basic standard of living for older adults with grandchildren in California is about twice the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), depending on the county. Using 200% FPL as an approximate measure, about two-fifths of older grandparents who are responsible for their grandchildren in the state do not have enough income to make ends meet. The Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index) for California calculates that the costs of housing, food, and the older adults health care account for more than two-thirds of total household expenses for grandparents and the grandchildren they are raising. Despite the high cost of basic needs, public assistance for low-income older adults and children continues to be squeezed. If they are to efficiently serve members of this fragile population, the existing programs that serve them need to maximize and streamline their impact through better coordination and collaboration.

Short sleep duration, which is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, has been shown to vary by occupation and industry, but few studies have investigated differences between black and white populations. By using data from a nationally representative sample of US adult short sleepers (n = 41,088) in the National Health Interview Survey in 2004–2011, we estimated prevalence ratios for short sleep duration in blacks compared with whites for each of 8 industry categories by using adjusted Poisson regression models with robust variance. Participants' mean age was 47 years; 50% were women and 13% were black. Blacks were more likely to report short sleep duration than whites (37% vs. 28%), and the black-white disparity was widest among those who held professional occupations. Adjusted short sleep duration was more prevalent in blacks than whites in the following industry categories: finance/information/real estate (prevalence ratio (PR) = 1.44, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.30, 1.59); professional/administrative/management (PR = 1.30, 95% CI: 1.18, 1.44); educational services (PR = 1.39, 95% CI: 1.25, 1.54); public administration/arts/other services (PR = 1.30, 95% CI: 1.21, 1.41); health care/social assistance (PR = 1.23, 95% CI: 1.14, 1.32); and manufacturing/construction (PR = 1.14, 95% CI: 1.07, 1.20). Short sleep generally increased with increasing professional responsibility within a given industry among blacks but decreased with increasing professional roles among whites. Our results suggest the need for further investigation of racial/ethnic differences in the work-sleep relationship.

This dissertation examines the extent to which urban education reform affects the ways in which gentrification unfolds. Popular reforms to public elementary and secondary schools, and to entire school districts, have been implemented throughout major American cities over the past several decades. While municipal officials frequently cite strictly educational goals related to student achievement when they champion such reforms, educational improvement is not the only objective at stake for cities pursuing school reform. As school quality has been cited as a prominent concern for middle-class families living within major cities, popular school reforms have increasingly been deployed by cities as part of an economic development strategy designed to attract and retain a stable middle class. To the extent that these school-based efforts to maintain an urban middle-class presence succeed, they have the potential to alter the process of gentrification in contemporary American cities.

We study the labor market effects of increased automation. We build a model in which firms optimally design machines, train workers, and assign these factors to tasks. Consistent with findings from computer science and robotics, the model features tasks which are difficult from an engineering perspective but easy for humans to carry out due to innate capacities for complex functions like vision, movement, and communication. In equilibrium, firms assign low-skill workers to such tasks. High skill workers have a comparative advantage in tasks which require much training and are difficult to automate. Workers in the middle of the skill distribution perform tasks of intermediate difficulty on both dimensions. When the cost of designing machines falls, firms adopt machines predominantly in tasks that were previously performed by middle-skill workers. Occupations at both the bottom and the top of the wage distribution experience employment gains. Wage inequality increases at the top but decreases at the bottom. As design costs fall much further, only the most skilled workers enjoy rising skill premiums, and an increasing fraction of the labor force is employed in jobs that require little or no training. The models implications are consistent with recent evidence of job polarization and a hollowing-out of the wage distribution. In addition, we provide novel evidence on trends in occupational training requirements that is in line with the models predictions.