This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income diff erentials aff ect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American CommunitySurvey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income di erentials into short-and long-term components and by focusing on newly arrived less-educated immigrants between 2000-2009. Our sample is unique in that although our interest is in measuring bilateral immigrant in flows (from origin countries into U.S. states), the vast majority ofour observations take zero values. We accommodate for the zeros by using scaled ordinary least squares, a threshold tobit model from Eaton and Tamura (1994), and the two-partmodel to analyze the determinants of immigration. Models that include observations with zero flow values find that recent male immigrants respond to di erences in (short-term)GDP fluctuations between origin countries and U.S. states, and perhaps to (long-term) trend GDP di erences as well. More speci cally, GDP fluctuations pull less-educatedmale immigrants into certain U.S. states, whereas GDP trends push less-educated male immigrants out of their countries of origin. Eff ects for less-educated women are less robust, as GDP coeffcients tend to be much smaller than for men.

The Digital Arts & Humanities (DAH) Working Group of the Research Support Services Collaborative was formed to investigate and recommend a coherent strategy for support of emerging digital arts and humanities scholarship on campus. This document is the final report of that group's activities from 2011-2012. Considering the strengths of organizations on campus and the most pressing support needs of emerging digital arts and digital humanities scholars at the University of Minnesota, the working group developed a set of near-­term and longer-­term recommendations. The recommendations center around opportunities for developing local partnerships and a local DAH community, coordinating support services, developing and promoting infrastructure and support for DAH scholarships, and exploring data curation needs.

Wage inequality has risen dramatically in the United States since at least 1980. This paper quantifies the role that the tax policies of the federal and state governments have played in mitigating wage inequality. The analysis, which isolates the contribution of federal taxes and state taxes separately, employs two approaches. First, cross- sectional estimates compare before-tax and after-tax inequality across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Second, inequality estimates across time are calculated to assess the evolution of the effects of tax policies. The results from the first approach indicate that the tax code reduces wage inequality substantially in all states. On average, taxes reverse approximately the last two decades of growth in wage inequality. Most of this compression of the income distribution is attributable to federal taxes. Nevertheless, there is substantial cross-state variation in the extent to which state tax policies compress the income distribution. Cross-state differences in gasoline taxes have a surprisingly large impact on income compression, as do sales tax exemptions for food and clothing. The results of the second approach indicate that the mitigating influence of tax policy on wage inequality has increased very modestly since the early 1980s. The increase is due to the widening of the pre-tax wage distribution interacting with a progressive tax structure. In contrast, legislated tax changes over this period decreased income compression somewhat.

People who are low income, ill-educated or unemployed are much more likely to be arrested and go to prison than more highly-educated affluent employed people (Western 2006). It is often assumed that the rise in incarceration over time tracked a rise in poverty, or that this strong individual-level difference will be found in aggregate comparisons across time or between places. This is not so, however. This paper examines the national trends over time and the comparisons between states. The time trends make it clear that imprisonment trends were uncorrelated with the cycles of poverty or unemployment, and the rise and (partial) fall in the imprisonment disparity was uncorrelated with changes in the disparity in poverty or unemployment. It is also often assumed that much of the racial difference in imprisonment is due to poverty or educational differences. This is also not true. The racial disparity in incarceration is not appreciably reduced when education is controlled. Table 1 shows the estimated probability of a man’s ever having been imprisoned in two national samples as presented by Western (2006) supplemented by the implied disparity ratios (which are calculated by dividing the Black percentage by the White percentage). As the table indicates, there are substantial educational disparity ratios within race: men who did not graduate high school are much more likely to have spent time in prison, and those who have been to college are much less likely to have spent time in prison. But there remain substantial racial disparities within educational groups. Further, most of the within-education racial disparities are larger than the within-race educational disparities, and the racial disparities are generally higher for more educated men. Turning this around, the educational disparities are lower for Blacks than Whites. That is, education made a bigger difference in the chances of going to prison for a White man than a Black man.1 This project uses aggregate-level data and does not control for individuals’ education. But there is no basis for believing that a control for education or poverty would reduce the salience of the race effect in aggregate data. Further, there are some surprising patterns across states. Consistent with previous research, economic factors have only weak relations with imprisonment trends. While, as we would expect, the rate of White imprisonment higher in states where White poverty was higher, the rate of Black imprisonment was actually lower in states where Black poverty was higher! The relationship is weak and appears to be driven by the low Black imprisonment rates of Southern states. At the state level, there is the expected positive relation between the Black/White disparity in poverty and the Black/White disparity in poverty. However, these state-level relations are not replicated when the unit of analysis is the metro area, where the main pattern is a zero or very weak correlation between economic factors and imprisonment.

Post-1960s housing policies encouraged broad-based mortgage lending to disadvantaged classes. During the past decade, the United States experienced a particular boom in mortgage lending that economists referred to as a democratization of credit, where banks provided access to homeownership for formerly excluded, disadvantaged groups including racial and ethnic minorities. This study uses nationally representative Integrated Public Use Microdata to examine trends in homeownership by race in the United States from 2000-2010. Multivariate logistic regressions find that the well-documented negative minority association with homeownership decreased considerably for Hispanic households but was sustained for black households. Initial gains in homeownership experienced by black households in the earlier part of the decade were almost entirely lost by 2009. The analysis concludes that mortgage credit was not democratized, but developments in the mortgage market were felt differently across racial and ethnic boundaries. What occurred in the housing market between 2000 and 2010 can be more accurately described as a faade of a democratization of mortgage credit. In conclusion, the mortgage market remains highly inequitable; however Hispanic households are entering into homeownership at unprecedented levels while black households remain as disadvantaged as they were ten years ago.

The United States currently faces record high levels of uninsured individuals, rising healthcare costs, and increasing self-employment. A new dataset was introduced, the American Community Surveys, to confirm whether the self-employed are at a disadvantage in terms of access to health insurance, and if so, what socioeconomic, family, demographic, and occupation factors may exacerbate the problem. Results indicate that the self-employed are in fact at a significant disadvantage regarding health insurance coverage. Family income level, marital status, having a self-employed spouse, age, ethnicity, migration status, and occupational industry were found to be associated with the likelihood that a self-employed individual would have health insurance coverage.

We examine the health of African immigrants to the United States, a relatively understudied but rapidly growing population. Informed by research on immigrants health advantage, we utilize a pooled, six-year sample of the National Health Interview Survey (N=145,144) to compare African immigrants to Latin American immigrants and to native-born U.S. residents on three health outcomes: self-reported health status, any serious medical condition, and any functional limitation. In bivariate analysis, we find that Latin American-born and native-born residents have poorer health compared to African-born residents on all three measures. We test several theories to account for these differences, including migrant selectivity, acculturation, health care access, and health behaviors. Once we control for these intermediate mechanisms in multivariate analysis, the influence of nativity diminishes substantially, suggesting that each of these theories contributes to the explanation of the African immigrant health advantage relative to Latin American immigrants and the native-born.

The focus of this paper is to examine the economic returns from self-employment when comparing natives and immigrants. I hypothesize that returns from self-employment will increase with age and education, and that immigrants from China, India, and the Philippines will have higher returns while immigrants from Mexico will have lower returns than natives. I also hypothesize that immigrants with high levels of education will earn more than natives with the same amount of education. The OLS regressions show that human capital variables explain the differences in self-employed income between natives and immigrants, as the literature suggests.

We examine the health of African immigrants to the United States, a relatively understudied but rapidly growing population. Informed by research on immigrants health advantage, we utilize a pooled, six-year sample of the National Health Interview Survey (N=145,144) to compare African immigrants to Latin American immigrants and to native-born U.S. residents on three health outcomes: self-reported health status, any serious medical condition, and any functional limitation. In bivariate analysis, we find that Latin American-born and native-born residents have poorer health compared to African-born residents on all three measures. We test several theories to account for these differences, including migrant selectivity, acculturation, health care access, and health behaviors. Once we control for these intermediate mechanisms in multivariate analysis, the influence of nativity diminishes substantially, suggesting that each of these theories contributes to the explanation of the African immigrant health advantage relative to Latin American immigrants and the native-born.

A dissertação tem como objecto de estudo a companhia de Simón Ruiz, na segunda metade do século XVI. Apresenta como proposta metodológica a análise dos lugares de negócio da rede organizada pelo mercador castelhano. Pretende, desta forma, compreender o papel do espaço nas dinâmicas das redes mercantis, num contexto de expansão económica a nível global. A historiografia recente tem comprovado que a economia na época moderna foi dinamizada por redes de mercadores que operaram a grandes distâncias, a partir de firmas dispersas ao longo das rotas comerciais. Para a compreensão deste fenómeno, reconhece-se a necessidade de representações espaciais, dado que o espaço geográfico providencia o enquadramento físico para a criação e difusão de redes. Neste contexto, a tese de doutoramento segue e aplica os fundamentos teóricos da spatial history, pretendendo destacar o papel do espaço na exploração e análise dos fenómenos históricos. No primeiro nível, procuramos caracterizar individualmente os lugares-chave da rede de negócios de Simón Ruiz, tendo em conta os seus atributos e funções, tendo sido reconstituídas a suas "biografias". Esta primeira abordagem aos lugares da rede tem como objectivo perceber de que modo o perfil de cada lugar contribui para as estratégias de negócio. São consideradas questões como a multifuncionalidade ou a especialização, e a variabilidade das suas funções ao longo do tempo. São analisadas as geoentidades Medina del Campo, Lisboa, Antuérpia, Lyon, Madrid, Florença, Valladolid, Roma, Nantes e Sevilha. No segundo nível, é feita uma análise dinâmica da articulação dos lugares da rede, em ordem a identificar os espaços económicos da companhia, resultantes, em simultâneo, dos atributos, das funções e das relações estabelecidas entre os lugares. A análise recai aqui sobre a totalidade de lugares, sendo aí analisados os fluxos financeiros

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S.,which, over the period 1948-2007, mainly coincides with the remarkable rise in services. The service sector accounts today for more than 83% of total employment, while the same share was 60% in 1947. Roughly 40% of this growth comes from a single industry within services, namely Professional and Business Services. This is a peculiar sector, given that more than 90% of its output is used by other firms as an intermediate input or investment; and it is where most of the service outsourcing activity is concentrated. The same evidence appears in the structure of the Input-Output tables, the rise of the share of Professional and Business Services is in fact the main change that has taken place over the past 60 years. Using a simple accounting framework, which is capable of capturing the fully-fledged input-output structure of the economy, I calculate the contribution of outsourcing to the reallocation of employment across sectors. I find that Professional and Business Services outsourcing alone accounts for 14% of the total increase in the share of services in total employment.

In this paper, we reconstructed the spatial organization of Western medical services in Beijing city during the Republican period using a recently completed Republican Beijing GIS dataset. The primary objective is to explore the utility of spatial analytical methods, such as hotspot analysis and geographically weighted regression (GWR), in studying the spatial patterns of Western medical services. Our study is successful in depicting the spatial structure of Western medical services in the city. In addition, our analysis offers a preliminary but holistic view of the spatial relationships between Western medical services in the city and traditional Chinese medicine, population distribution, temple locations and industry-commerce patterns.

Social scientists in the modernization school argue that industrialization and modernization lead societies to be “open” societies characterized by equal opportunities and a central importance of individual efforts and achievements in social mobility. They assume, using nation-states as the unit of analysis, that stratification takes place primarily and exclusively within nations. This study, by contrast, perceives stratification and social mobility as processes taking place globally. Shifting its focus from national dimensions to global and transnational dimensions, this study investigates the global social mobility of South Koreans, including Korean immigrants in the United States. This study situates income earnings and social mobility of non-migrant South Koreans and Korean immigrants in the United States within broader patterns of transnational and global social mobility, and reassesses the relative weight of categorical attributes (e.g. country) with that of human capitals (e.g. college education). The results suggest that how social stratification, despite the modernization of South Korea and the United States, remains shaped by categorical inequalities. In this sense, achievement and ascription, as criteria of selection, continue to be fundamental to global stratification. The role of achievement is far more modest than usually assumed when compared to the continuing impact of categorical attributes such as race/ethnicity and nationality.

Education is essential to personal welfare. As educational levels increase, personal income rises, the quality of life improves, and society benefits as criminality declines, tax income increases, and the cost of social programs decreases. Unfortunately, every year thousands of students leave high school without graduating. Various factors place students at-risk of dropping out, but the question remains why some at-risk students drop out while others graduate. This phenomenology investigates dropping out by following the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas, guided by the work of Max van Manen. Participants discussed their lifeworld experiences and explained factors that had caused them to leave school. Through conversations with dropouts, this study discovered five themes related to dropping out. These were: In participants’ lifeworlds, dropping out was not unusual; participants’ worldviews often disconnected from life’s realities; participants remained resilient despite their disadvantaged lives and educational setbacks; participants lacked social capital that could have helped them escape their lifeworlds, and participants had often been invisible to people who could have provided help. These themes do not stand alone, but meld into a picture of lives lacking the basic elements of success and the supporting relationships needed to succeed. The study concluded that schools cannot alter many elements dropouts’ lifeworlds but can reduce dropping out by identifying potential dropouts and providing supportive personal relationships. This dissertation includes recommendations on how schools can better support disengaged students and recommendations for further research and action to increase graduation rates.

We examine the causal effect of education on migration using variation in college attainment due to draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War We use national and state-level induction risk to identify both college attainment and veteran status for men observed in the 1980 Census. 2SLS estimates imply that additional years of college significantly increased the likelihood that affected men resided outside their birth states later in life. Most of our estimates suggest a causal impact of higher education on migration that is larger in magnitude but not significantly different from the OLS estimates.

This dissertation reports on an investigation into the effects of location on corn production and productivity. The landscape of crop production is dynamic— where crops are produced changes dramatically over time. The answers to important questions about the potential impacts of global climate change and whether agriculture will be able to meet the world’s increasing need for food are affected by the moving footprint of production. However, most studies of agricultural productivity and the effects of global warming do not consider that agriculture moves, and that the concomitant changes in natural services have important effects. A full set of county-level census data on corn production and area in the United States have been digitized and assembled for the first time, and new methods have been applied to account for changing geopolitical boundaries. Concepts adapted from economic index number theory are used to show that some 15 to 20 percent of the change in U.S. corn output over the past 130 years has come about due to shifts in where corn is produced. A newly developed, long-run, corn-specific weather dataset is used with the county data to show that, because of changes in the location of production, U.S. corn is now grown in cooler climates than it was a century ago, possibly offsetting some of the potential impacts of climate change. Finally, methods from ecological modeling, spatial econometrics, and crop modeling are combined to create a corn yield model that is then used to develop a location- and season-specific crop suitability indicator that takes into account the intra-seasonal dynamics of weather and the complex relationships between weather and yields. It will be shown that the suitability metric developed in this study gives results that are both consistent and more interpretable than more traditional approaches.

Many merit-based scholarships for college are administered at the state level, targeted to in-state residents and require attendance at an in-state institution. Though these subsidies have the potential to affect lifetime education and migration decisions, much of the literature to date has focused on just one or two outcomes (e.g. college attendance and completion) and one or two states (e.g. Georgia). Given that one of the stated goals of these programs is to increase the quality of a state's workforce, understanding the long-term effects of merit-based scholarships on mobility is crucial for evaluating their effectiveness. In this paper, we utilize the broader expansion and long history of these programs to build a comprehensive picture of how merit aid scholarship availability affects residential migration and educational attainment. To do this, we incorporate data on the introduction of broad-based merit aid programs for ̋fifteen states and Census data on all 24 to 32 year olds in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. We use variation in merit aid eligibility across cohorts and within states to identify treatment effects. Eligibility for merit aid programs slightly increases the propensity of state natives to live in-state, while also extending enrollment in-state into the late twenties. These patterns notwithstanding, the magnitude of merit aid effects is of an order of magnitude smaller than the population treated, suggesting that nearly all of the spending on these programs is transferred to individuals who do not alter educational or migration behavior.