The report examines the fiscal impact of undocumented persons at the federal, state, and local levels in order to explain the likely effects of an amnesty program. The report first provides background on the population of undocumented persons in the United States and an overview of the laws which govern their status. Details of past and current amnesty legislation are given. The channels through which undocumented immigrants have a fiscal impact on the three levels of government in the United States are explained. The paper discusses the economic theory relating to immigration and its effect on economic growth. Published works on the fiscal impact of the undocumented on state and local budgets and on federal programs such as social security are reviewed. The research reviewed includes an analysis of the long-term fiscal impact of immigrants. Undocumented immigrants impose a net cost at the state and local levels in most cases. However, many undocumented immigrants make income and payroll tax payments and the population of undocumented immigrants imposes a net benefit at the federal level. These sources of information are then used to explain how an amnesty program might change the fiscal impact of the undocumented at the three levels of government. The recent executive order signed by President Obama, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), is an amnesty program that has a strong potential to help the U.S. economy retain young and highly educated workers, who have a positive fiscal impact on government finances. This report draws certain recommendations for the design of a successful amnesty and for implementing other immigration reforms from published research.

A common claim in the literature is that higher-educated persons are more likely to marry outside their ethnic/racial group than lower-educated persons. We reexamine this educational gradient with a multilevel analysis of 46 immigrant groups in the Current Population Survey. We find that there are positive effects not only of individual education on intermarriage but also of the educational level of a group. Moreover, the educational gradient declines when the aggregate level of education of an immigrant group is higher. The aggregate effect of education points to cultural explanations of the gradient that emphasize the role of interethnic attitudes. The interaction effect points to a structural explanation that explains the gradient in terms of opportunities of finding similarly educated spouses within the group.

For many multi-dimensional data applications, tensor operations as well as relational operations need to be supported throughout the data lifecycle. Although tensor decomposition is shown to be effective for multi-dimensional data analysis, the cost of tensor decomposition is often very high. We propose a novel decomposition-by-normalization scheme that first normalizes the given relation into smaller tensors based on the functional dependencies of the relation and then performs the decomposition using these smaller tensors. The decomposition and recombination steps of the decomposition-by-normalization scheme t naturally in settings with multiple cores. This leads to a highly efficient, effective, and parallelized decomposition-by-normalization algorithm for both dense and sparse tensors. Experiments con rm the e$ciency and e ectiveness of the proposed decomposition-by-normalization scheme compared to the conventional nonnegative CP decomposition approach.

Why do parents divide bequests equally while transferring inter vivos gifts unequally? Across times and places, why have there mainly been only two extreme choices of distribution of bequests: either to give them to just one child (unigeniture) or to divide them equally (equigeniture)? How can a motive for intergenerational transfers explain both "equal division puzzle" (the former) and polarized inheritance patterns (the latter)? This paper presents a behavioral model that coherently rationalizes these empirical realities. Namely, as head of a family, a parent altruistically cares about children but also wants them to spend effort for family. However, effort is costly and individual level of each child is unverifiable to a third party adjudicator. Given this incomplete information, there rise only two stable equilibria: either equigeniture or unigeniture. When the productivity of effort rises, the evolution of inheritance pattern from unigeniture to equigeniture occurs. So equigeniture is eventually adopted due to a rise in the productivity throughout industrialization. Furthermore, if the parent wants to counterbalance inequality among children who exert equal effort, the greater amount of inter vivos gift is transferred to a child with lower relative income compared to his siblings, while bequests remain equally divided. This model is consistent with the aforementioned empirical realities but also lends itself to further empirical tests. First of all, with a data set of pre-industrial agrarian societies, we find that a rise in the productivity of effort causes equigeniture to be chosen over unigeniture, which is consistent with the model. Second of all, through an empirical analysis on a micro-level data on inter vivos transfers in contemporary families, we find supporting evidence as follows: (i) income inequality among children increases the probability that their parent gives any inter vivos gift; and (ii) the amount of the gift is negatively associated with relative income of each child compared to his siblings.

Inclusionary zoning, also known as below-market housing mandates, is now in place in one-third of California cities and is spreading around the United States. Supporters of this policy advocate making housing more affordable by placing price controls on a percentage of new homes. But if almost all economists agree that price controls on housing reduce quantity and cause shortages, why do so many policymakers or voters support them? Ellickson (1981) argued that inclusionary zoning may be popular precisely because, contrary to the expressed goals of the program, it actually restricts supply and leads to higher prices. Incumbent homeowners and policymakers catering to them can benefit from restricting new supply. Using panel data and a first difference model, we test how the policy affected the price and quantity of housing in California cities between 1980, 1990, and 2000. Under various specifications we find that cities adopting below-market housing mandates end up with higher prices and fewer homes. Between 1980 and 1990, cities imposing below-market housing mandates end up with 9 percent higher prices and 8 percent fewer homes overall. Between 1990 and 2000 cities imposing belowmarket housing mandates end up with 20 percent higher prices and 7 percent fewer homes overall. Consistent with Ellicksons hypothesis, the program may not be about increasing the supply of housing or making it more affordable overall.

The paper uses Census data to calculate three alternative measures of metropolitan housing costs in 1990 and 2000. It compares their ability to predict the shelter portion of the Consumer Price Index, and then picks the best of the three for further scrutiny. In a small sample of metropolitan areas, the best measure predicts 40% of the variation in the change in the shelter portion of the CPI. In a larger sample, it does less well predicting a proxy. However, tested against a commonly used proprietary measure, the ACCRA index, the best measure predicts the CPI proxy somewhat better. The paper concludes that the best index, which is straightforward to calculate, has some promise as a measure of living costs beyond the 25 metropolitan areas where the CPI is available.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) has a long and rich history of achievement among diverse populations. Two recent events have added to the complexity of CTE. First, the accountability movement forces traditional programs to show growth and achievement with students. Accountability trends affect the content and delivery of almost all programs. Perhaps more significantly, measureable performance is increasingly becoming tied into program funding with CTE programs. Second, while CTE in general has enjoyed a long history in secondary education, an emerging subcomponent is gaining attention. Information Technology (IT) classes have been present in secondary institutions for over 30 years. Business, industry, and government organizations, however, have been actively searching for more standardized programs that deliver a full supply of highly skilled, IT capable individuals. Over 1000 IT certifications exist, many available at the secondary level (Randell & Zirkle, 2005). Traditionally, most IT training has occurred in technical and other post-secondary academic institutions. Recent pressures, however, are forcing certification requirements downward to secondary institutions. Career and college readiness standards, as well as national, state, and local accountability initiatives are influencing many aspects of high school certification programs. Little is known, however, about the short and long term effectiveness of these programs and with what populations. It is the purpose of this study to examine the primary and secondary effects of IT certification curricula on the self efficacy of a diverse sample of high school IT certification students.

Diaspora networks are a major source of information for future migrants. While the existing literature explains the effect of networks on migration decisions throughthe size of the migrant community, we show that the quality of the network is an important determinant of the timing and outcome of migration decisions. We argue that networks that are more integrated in the society of the host countrycan give more accurate information about job prospects to future migrants. In a decision model with imperfect signalling we show that migrants with access to a better network are more likely to make the right decision they migrate only if they gain and they migrate earlier. Using data on Mexicans in the US we show that the theoretical predictions are consistent with the data.

This study investigates the perceptions of Hispanic tenure track faculty in New Mexico regarding their educational experiences, family background, and life experiences that empowered them to become professors. It is a qualitative study in which Hispanic tenure and/or tenure track faculty were interviewed. This study identifies institutional, group, and individual barriers to minority faculty positions in academia as well as assets that can be attributed to success. The literature review identifies barriers and assets in detail and provides extensive documentation regarding the continual difficulties that institutions of higher education have in diversifying the faculty. A conceptual model, entitled the Doors of Perception, was developed, and the lenses of cultural density, cultural capital, and cultural fluidity are used to conceptualize the experiences of Hispanic faculty who are from high-density cultural environments and who attended high-density minority schools.

The population distribution in the United States follows a pattern of development known as urban sprawl. The trend of urban sprawl and its associated development of impervious land cover types such as natural and agricultural land to impervious land cover types such as roads, parking lots, and structures has had significant impacts on watershed hydrology and river ecosystems. As a watershed becomes increasingly developed, the discharge of the watershed increases and in effect the frequency and intensity of flood events increases. Using the Des Plaines River Watershed as a case study, a model was made to demonstrate that the use of population density as a measure of percent impervious cover is a viable proxy to show its correlation with river discharge. Population densities of the watershed were correlated against the watershed’s discharge for the decades between 1940 and 2010. The model indicated with a significance value of < 0.001 and an R squared value of 0.92 that population density within the Des Plaines River Watershed was positively correlated with the discharge of the Des Plaines River. The use of population density in this model as a proxy for percent impervious cover when land cover data is unavailable provides a robust approach for revealing how variations in level of development impacts watershed hydrology.

Garicano (2000) and Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) distinguish comprehensive information technology advances between information technology advances and communication technology advances, both of which have qualitatively different characteristics.Based on this distinction, this paper shows that, first, decreasing knowledge acquisition costs, due to advances in information technology, raise wage differentials between problem solvers and production workers and within-group wage differentials. Second, cheaper communication costs, due to communication technology advances, increase wage inequality between problem solvers and production workers and within-group wage inequality for problem solvers, but decrease within-group wage inequality for production workers. These heterogeneous impacts of information and communication technology advances on between-group wage inequality and on within-group wage inequality would provide a rationale for a wage polarization pattern in the recent U.S. labor market in which there is an increasing wage inequality in the upper-tail of wage distribution and a decreasing wage inequality in the lower-tail of wage distribution.

Chapter 1: The Road to Development: Empirical Evidence of the Effect of Roads on the U.S. Economy: 1904-1921.A cross-sectional county data set is created, using decennial census data and rural road data published by the Office of Public Roads, to analyze the effect of road infrastructure investment on U.S. aggregate output. Estimates of output elasticity with respect to road input are calculated utilizing a translog production function. Elasticity estimates range between -0.069 and 0.209. The results show that road capital had a small but positive effect on aggregate output in developing states with poor initial road networks. However, in states with a relatively high level of road infrastructure, additional spending on roads had a negative effect on aggregate output. The results suggest that investment in road spending is most effective in regions with a paucity of good roads.Chapter 2: The Political Economy of the Rural Roads in the Early 20th CenturyLocal expenditures on the rural roads in the United States increased dramatically in the first two decades of the 20th century. By 1920, total expenditures on roads and bridges were on par with total spending on public education. This study examines the determinants of road demand, as measured by levels of local road expenditures, using county-level expenditure data from road surveys conducted by the Office of Public Roads. The results indicate that increased amounts of state-aid on roads was associated with increased local road expenditures in the Mountain/Pacific region, but had relatively little effect in the North Atlantic and North Central regions. This suggests that state-aid may have been viewed as complementary with local road expenditures in the Mountain/Pacific region. The paper also found that the presence of farmers led to a significant reduction in the amount of local road expenditure. The opposition by farmers may explain a significant amount of the observed variation in local road expenditures across counties. Chapter 3: Paving the Way To Educational Success: Road Improvement and School Outcomes: 1900-1920In the early twentieth century, U.S. consolidated schools were a key to improved educational attainment. However, consolidated schools would not have been possible without the necessary road improvements to transport rural students to distant centralized schools. Here I show that road improvements explain 10 percent of the observed change in the fraction of rural schools consolidated in the Midwest. I also measure roads direct impact on educational outcomes. While roads had a modest effect on school attendance rates, I find that roads can explain a significant portion of the observed rise in the average number of days attended per pupil and teacher quality. There was thus a significant social externality associated with investments in road capital in the early U.S. in the form of better educational outcomes.

This dissertation consists of three essays broadly relating to globalization and firm performance. In the first essay, we address a relatively open question in the area of immigration: how do large inflows of highly skilled immigrants affect the rate of domestic innovation? We study this question in the context of the H-1B visa program, which is the primary temporary visa for work in the US. Immigrants constitute a large share of US inventors; foreign born workers account for 24 percent of scientists and engineers with bachelor's degrees and 47 percent of those with doctoral degrees.We find that larger inflows of highly skilled immigrants are associated with higher rates of innovation. This relationship is primarily driven by the contributions of the immigrants themselves. We find some tentative evidence for the crowding in of inventors who are US citizens and can reject the hypothesis that they are crowded out. These results suggest that there may be complementarities between foreign and domestic inventors...

This paper examines the associations between Chinese and Korean immigrant parents early life material and food deprivation and their concern about their childs diet or weight, preferences for heavier children, and weight-promoting diet and child weight, alongside the moderating role of parents acculturation toward American culture. In 2010, Chinese and Korean immigrant parents of children ages 38 years in the United States (N = 130) completed interviews which asked about their perceived early life material deprivation and food insecurity, acculturation, child feeding practices, and evaluations of whether their child weighed more or less than the ideal, and child consumption of soda and candy. Independent measures of child and parent BMI were also obtained. Regression analyses revealed that parents early life food insecurity was associated with the evaluation that their child should weigh more than they do and greater consumption of soda and sweets by their child, among the least acculturated parents. Parental material deprivation was associated with more laissez-faire child feeding practices: less monitoring, less concern about the childs weight or diet, and less perceived responsibility for the childs diet, but only among less acculturated parents. Overall, the results suggest that immigrant parents child feeding practices and body size evaluations are shaped by material hardship in childhood, but these influences may fade as acculturation occurs.

Prior to the mid-1980s, labor productivity growth was a useful barometer of the U.S. economys performance:it was low during economic recessions and high during expansions. Since then, labor productivityhas become significantly less procyclical. In the recent recession of 20082009, labor productivity actuallyrose as GDP plummeted. These facts have motivated the development of new business cycle theoriesbecause the conventional view is that they are inconsistent with existing business cycle theory. In thispaper, we analyze recent events with existing theory and find that the labor productivity puzzle is muchless of a puzzle than previously thought. In light of these findings, we argue that policy agendas arisingfrom new untested theories should be disregarded.

Using the American Community Survey augmented with results from the Urban Institutes Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM), we estimated eligibility, enrollment, and costs for a Basic Health Program (BHP) for Utah under the rules defined in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Important findings include these: 55,000 Utahns would qualify for BHP; between 31,000 and 41,000 would likely enroll, if BHP is structured like the states current CHIP program. We were able to break results out by substate areas. For example, we estimate BHP enrollment of 9,500 in western Salt Lake County and 6,100 in eastern Salt Lake County. For low-wage, working Utahns, BHP could substantially reduce the cost of health coverage and care, compared to the exchange with standard federal subsidies. With member cost sharing based on CHIP B, federal BHP payments would exceed state BHP costs by $300 per member per year. With the higher cost sharing of CHIP C, they would exceed costs by $1,100 per member. The surplus of federal payments over costs could be used to raise provider payments or lower member cost sharing. Applied entirely to provider reimbursement, the surplus could raise payments 8 percent over Medicaid levels if members receive CHIP B-level coverage or 27 percent if members receive coverage modeled after CHIP C. Even with BHP, the health insurance exchange in Utah would cover about 120,000 lives in the non-group market, down from about 160,000 without BHP. BHP-eligible adults are slightly healthier, on average, than others projected to receive non-group coverage under the ACA. Removing BHP adults from the exchange would thus increase non-group premiums by less than 2 percent. That increase could be avoided by including BHP in the same risk-sharing systems that apply to non-group plans. Administering Washington States Basic Health program took up 4 percent of total costs when it was run as a separate state program. There may be opportunities under the ACA to reduce these costs by integration with Medicaid managed care and the exchange.

The role of economic opportunities for women is largely neglected in accounts of 19th century American marriage patterns. However, they are considered very important for the late 20th century. The principle behind this is simple: women will choose to substitute away from marriage as alternatives become more attractive. Providing evidence for this mechanism is challenging, though, because of the inherent feedback between choices regarding marriage and career. In this paper, I provide evidence of a causal effect of womens income on their preferences for marriage during the years following the Civil War. I do this by analyzing the effect of Civil War pension income on the behavior of Union Army widows. Eligibility for a widows pension depended only on her first husbands military service and the circumstances of his death, so it should be uncorrelated with the widows own characteristics. Moreover, pensions terminated upon remarriage. Thus, pensions should have affected marital outcomes only insofar as they altered womens preferences for marriage. I draw a sample of widows from the Union Army database created by the Center for Population Economics, and I collect information about these widows pensions and marriage histories from the Civil War pension files at the National Archives in Washington, DC. My estimates indicate that, over a five year period, receiving a pension lowered the rate of remarriage by 55 percent, which implies an increase in the median time to remarriage of approximately two years. This suggests that 19th century women were willing to substitute away from marriage if the alternatives were favorable enough. As well as providing new information about 19th century marriage markets, this sheds light on the patterns we observe during the 20th century. In particular, it suggests that a willingness to substitute outside economic opportunities for marriage is rooted in fundamental preferences, not a new behavior brought about by changing social norms.

In this paper, we revisit the Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008: Selection, investment and women's relative wages over time. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(3):1061-1110) analysis about the composition of the female workforce in the United States. Using a Heckman selection model, these authors found that the selection of women into the female workforce changed from negative to positive over time. However, the authors assumed the exogeneity of covariates, which is sometimes appropriate but not for a variable like education. We revisit the issue of the Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008) paper by developing and applying a Heckman selection model which also controls for the potential endogeneity of education. Applying this estimator to U.S. Census and American Community Survey data, we find that selection has become more positive over time (like in Mulligan and Rubinstein), but that selection has never been negative. We rather find an interesting puzzle concerning the correlation pattern of the unobservables in our model which requires further investigation.

This paper examines the effects of introducing compulsory attendance laws on the schooling of U.S. children for three overlapping time periods: 1880-1927, 1890-1927, and 1898-1927. The previous literature finds little effect of the laws, which is somewhat surprising given that the passage of these laws coincided with rising attendance. Using administrative panel data, this paper finds that laws passed after 1880 had significant effects on enrollment and attendance. Laws passed after 1890, for which both administrative and retrospective census data are available, had significant effects on enrollment, attendance, and educational outcomes. In both cases, the timing of increases in enrollment and attendance is consistent with a causal effect of the laws. For men in the 1898-1927 period who reported positive wage income in the 1940 census, compulsory attendance laws increased schooling and wage income. The OLS estimates of the return to a year of schooling are 8 percent and the IV estimates are 11 to 14 percent.