Using a double cohort methodological design linking age and duration within the United States and data from the 1990, 2000 census, as well as the 2010 American Community Survey, this paper examines the process of Cuban immigrant integration with respect to language acquisition, citizenship status, and poverty status. Previous studies of Cuban immigrant cohorts residing in Miami-Dade County showed that there has been integration into mainstream American society using these benchmarks, but there were some special cases with language acquisition. This paper updates this research and focuses nationally on Cuban immigrant cohort integration. Where there are large enough populations of Cuban immigrant cohorts, there will be an examination at the metropolitan level to compare integration success at the local level.

Building what we call social tables, this paper quantifies the level and inequality of American incomes from 1774 to 1860. In 1774 the American colonies had average incomes exceeding those of the Mother Country, even when slave households are included in the aggregate. Between 1774 and 1790, this income advantage over Britain was lost, due to the severe dislocation caused by the fight for Independence. Then between 1790 and 1860 US income per capita grew even faster than previous scholars have estimated. We also find that the South was initially much richer than the North on the eve of Revolution, but then suffered a severe reversal of fortune, so that by 1840 its white population was already poorer than free Northerners. In terms of inequality, our estimates suggest that American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales around 1774. Indeed, New England and the Middle Colonies appear to have been more egalitarian than anywhere else in the measurable world. Income inequality rose dramatically between 1774 and 1860, especially in the South. The paper uses an open-source style, since our data processing is posted on http://gpih.ucdavis.edu (click on the folder American incomes 1774-1870). Detailed defense of the 1774 and 1800 benchmarks can be found in our previous NBER working paper (17211, July 2011), although the estimates reported here are revised. The 1860 estimates are completely new.

We examine the effects of recently adopted state merit-based financial aid programs on college attendance and degree completion. Our primary analysis uses microdata from the 2000 Census and 2001-2010 American Community Survey to estimate the effects of merit programs on educational outcomes for 25 merit aid adopting states. We also utilize administrative data for the University System of Georgia to look more in depth at the effects of the HOPE Scholarship on degree completion in Georgia. We find strong consistent evidence that state merit aid programs have no meaningfully positive effect on college completion. Coefficient estimates for our preferred specifications are small and statistically insignificant. State merit aid programs do not appear to increase the percentage of young people with a college education.

With more than 15 million workers in the sector, and leverage over workplace standards across the supply chain, retail wields enormous influence on Americans’ standard of living and the nation’s economic outlook. It connects producers and consumers, workers and jobs, and local social and economic development to the larger US economy. And over the next decade, retail will be the second largest source of new jobs in the United States.1 Given the vital role retail plays in our economy, the question of whether employees in the sector are compensated at a level that promotes American prosperity is of national importance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical retail sales person earns just $21,000 per year. Cashiers earn even less, bringing home an annual income of just $18,500.2 The continued dominance of low wages in this sector weakens our nation’s capacity to boost living standards and economic growth. Retail’s low-wage employment means that even Americans who work full-time fail to make ends meet, and growth slows because too few families have enough remaining in each paycheck to contribute to the broader economy. This study assumes a new wage floor for the lowest-paid retail workers equivalent to $25,000 per year for a full-time, year-round retail worker at the nation’s largest retail companies—those employing at least 1,000 workers. For the typical worker earning less than this threshold, the new floor would mean a 27 percent pay raise. Including both the direct effects of the wage raise and spillover effects, the new floor will impact more than 5 million retail workers and their families. This study examines the impact of the new wage floor on economic growth and job creation, on consumers in terms of prices, on companies in terms of profit and sales, and for retail workers in terms of their purchasing power and poverty status. We model these effects based on the 2012 March Supplement to the Current Population Survey, using retail consumer data from the Neilson Company and macroeconomic multipliers derived by Moody’s Analytics. For a full description of the study methodology see the appendix.

Survival rates were low in large 19th-century American cities. We ask whether this was attributable to a few bad wards or whether urban wards were uniformly bad. The paper employs two datasets. The Union Army database has been augmented with veterans who enlisted in and/or resided in Boston, Chicago, New York City (including Brooklyn), and Philadelphia. Additionally, the Historical Urban Ecology (HUE) database has been created containing ward-level data on health indicators, the expansion of public infrastructure, and socio-economic indicators. These data are used to construct a Ward Development Index which identifies good versus bad wards and is part of hazard ratio regressions. Preliminary results suggest there is little difference between good and bad wards in 1860. By 1900, however, the urban mortality penalty remains in bad wards and is much reduced in good wards. Understanding why this difference emerged is vital to understanding the urban mortality transition.

Executive Order 13166 requires, among other things, that each federal department and agency examine the services it provides to limited English proficient (LEP) persons and develop and implement a system by which LEP persons have meaningful access to those services without unduly burdening the fundamental mission of the agency. Yet, meaningful access is not just a one-size fits all. An important component to understanding how meaningful access can be implemented is dependent on the characteristics of the LEP population and should be seen as a first step to begin this process. This paper will focus on the immigrant adult (18+) population with respect to their potential need for language services for meaningful access and their characteristics.

Women, Work, and Poverty presents the latest information on women living at or below the poverty level and the changes that need to be made in public policy to allow them to rise above their economic hardships. Using a wide range of research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, small-scale surveys, and analysis of personnel records, the book explores different aspects of women’s poverty since the passage of the 1986 welfare reform bill. Anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and social workers examine marriage, divorce, children and child care, employment and work schedules, disabilities, mental health, and education, and look at income support programs, such as welfare and unemployment insurance. Women, Work, and Poverty illuminates the changes in the causes of women’s poverty following welfare reform in the United States, using up-to-date research that’s both qualitative and quantitative. Taking racial and ethnic diversity into account, the book’s contributors examine new findings on the feminization of poverty, the role of children and the lack of child care as an obstacle to employment, labor market policies that can reduce poverty and improve gender wage equality, sex and race segregation in the labor market, and the low quality of jobs available to low income women.

A growing body of empirical research finds that mothers and caretakers experience significant workplace penalties, including negative evaluations, lower pay, and reduced prospects for promotion. Can law reduce these workplace penalties for mothers and caretakers? We present recent theoretical developments and research that uncover the social psychological mechanisms producing these disadvantages. We then discuss our theory and the results of an experimental laboratory study that show how laws prohibiting discrimination against workers who take family leave can eliminate these biases. Drawing on theories from law and society scholars, we contend that law affects society not only through punitive sanctions but also by changing moral judgments. This argument is confirmed by our finding that when the FMLA was made salient to evaluators, the law eliminated not only wage and promotion penalties for mothers and caretakers, but also negative normative judgments of these workers. In contrast, voluntary organizational policies made salient in the same manner produced mixed results, and in some instances increased discriminatory evaluations. These findings indicate that law can mitigate workplace penalties by changing normative judgments about mothers and caretakers, and that the law is more effective than voluntary policies in counteracting the disadvantages caretakers experience.

We develop a theory of marriage and fertility, distinguishing the choice to have chil- dren from the choice of the number of children. The deep parameters of the model are identified from the 1990 US Census. We measure voluntary and involuntary childless- ness, and explain why (1) single women are more often childless than married women but, when mothers, their fertility are almost similar; (2) childlessness exhibits a U- shaped relationship with education for both single and married; (3) the relationship between marriage rates and education is hump-shaped. We show how family patterns have been shaped by the rise in education and wage inequality, and by the shrinking gender wage gap.

Pharmacy has become a female-majority profession that is highly remunerated with a small gender earnings gap and low earnings dispersion relative to other occupations. We sketch a labor market framework based on the theory of equalizing differences to integrate and interpret our empirical findings on earnings, hours of work, and the part-time work wage penalty for pharmacists. Using extensive surveys of pharmacists for 2000, 2004, and 2009 as well as samples from the American Community Surveys and the Current Population Surveys, we explore the gender earnings gap, the penalty to part-time work, labor force persistence, and the demographics of pharmacists relative to other college graduates. We address why the substantial entrance of women into the profession was associated with an increase in their earnings relative to male pharmacists. We conclude that the changing nature of pharmacy employment with the growth of large national pharmacy chains and hospitals and the related decline of independent pharmacies played key roles in the creation of a more family-friendly, female-friendly pharmacy profession. The position of pharmacist is probably the most egalitarian of all U.S. professions today.

Committee on National Statistics, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

The effect that immigration has on labor markets in the receiving countries, andin particular on wages, is one of the most debated questions on immigration. Akey challenge in addressing this question empirically is to construct an appropriatecounterfactual situation: although wages of native workers are observed afterimmigration has taken place, it is not observed how wages would have evolved in theabsence of immigration. The central issue in the empirical literature is the constructionof a plausible estimate for this counterfactual situation.One approach is to slice the labor market into cells along some dimension, suchas regions or skill groups, and to use the variation induced by the differences inimmigration intensity across these cells to estimate the effect of immigration onwages.1 Of course, understanding how immigrants select into these cells is critical, andthe literature has addressed this by either focusing on situations in which the allocationto cells is plausibly random (see e.g. Card 1990; Glitz 2011), or by instrumentingimmigrant inflows...

The Affordable Care Act is a substantial reform of the health care insurance system in the United States. Its effects will have a significant impact on state and local economies that require detailed analysis. This document assesses the economic effects of the Affordable Care Act on the state of Arkansas.This document is an examination of the economic impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on Arkansas. The ACA will increase coverage through the expansion of Medicaid and the creation of a Health Insurance Exchange with subsidies. We used the RAND COMPARE model to analyze the ACAs economic impact on Arkansas. We found that by 2016 about 400,000 people will be newly insured, net federal payments to the state will amount to $430 million annually, and the total gross domestic product will be a net increase of $550 million.The research was sponsored by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement and conducted in RAND Health, a division of the RAND Corporation. A profile of RAND Health, abstracts of its publications, and ordering information can be found at www.rand.org/health.The authors would like to thank Christine Eibner and Chapin White for their thoughtful comments and reviews of this document.

Researchers have used the positive relationship between height and earnings to shed light on the productivity of health as well as the effect of health on economic growth. Aprominent explanation for this relationship is that physical growth and cognitive development share inputs, inducing a correlation between height and two productive skills, strength and intelligence. This paper uses data from Mexico to examine the skill returns underlying the labor market height premium in poorer countries. Consistent with the shared inputs hypothesis, parental socioeconomic status and childhood living conditions are positively associated with height, cognitive skill, and educational attainment in adulthood. Cognitive test scores account for a limited portion of the earnings premium to taller workers, but roughly half of the premium can be attributed to these workers higher educational attainment or to their more lucrative occupations, which have greater intelligence requirements and lower strength requirements. These patterns suggest that the height premium partly reflects a return to cognitive skill, even in an economy relianton manual labor.

Over the last several decades, womens rates of college attendance and completion, which used to be lower than mens, have grown to exceed mens rates by a considerable margin. Following work by Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko (2006), this paper focuses on the role of teenagers anticipated labor force participation in explaining the upward trend in women's college-going. A simple formal model implies that individuals with more anticipated hours of work are more likely to invest in college education. My analysis using data from three National Longitudinal Surveys supports the theoretical implication. This finding, combined with the trend towards higher work anticipation of young women across birth cohorts, may account in part for the upward trends in women's college attendance and completion.

Few prior studies have investigated the health of U.S. immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU). Utilizing data from the 2000 U.S. census and the 20002007 National Health Interview Survey (NIHS), we compare levels of disability of FSU immigrants with U.S.-born whites (ages 5084). Our findings suggest an epidemiologic paradox in that FSU immigrants possess higher levels of education compared with U.S.-born whites, but report considerably higher disability with and without adjustment for education. Nonetheless, FSU immigrants report lower levels of smoking and heavy alcohol use compared with U.S.-born whites.We further investigate disability by period of arrival among FSU immigrants. Changes in Soviet emigration policies conceivably altered the level of health selectivity among migrs.We find evidence that FSU immigrants who emigrated during a period when a permission to emigrate was hard to obtain (19701986) displayed less disability compared with those who emigrated when these restrictions were less stringent (19872000). Finally, we compare disability among Russian-born U.S. immigrants with that of those residing in Russia as a direct test of health selectivity. We find that Russian immigrants report lower levels of disability compared with Russians in Russia, suggesting that they are positively selected for health despite their poor health relative to U.S.-born whites.

I present three essays discussing the impact of archaic institutions and technology on inequality in wages and political participation. First I examine a modern facet of the Indian caste system: political quotas for disadvantaged minorities and their impact on political participation. I find that aggregate turnout falls by 9% of the baseline and right-wing parties win 50% more often, but electoral competition is not significantly affected. Detailed individual-level data for one state suggests that voter participation falls among women and minorities. This suggests that restricting candidate identity to minorities may cause some bias in voter participation. Next, I study caste and human capital: specifically why workers remain in lowpaying hereditary occupations, providing an explanation for both occupational specialization and hereditary occupations. I use a simple model of insurance provision in which parents pass on human capital to their children in return for insurance in the event of sickness, and find that workers with low human capital are likelier to participate in the arrangement, and that a higher cost of sickness can sustain higher human capital transfers. I conclude by studying human capital and technology- the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on wage inequality. We tested the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labour markets, by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries from 1980-2004, we find that industries with faster ICT growth shifted demand from middle educated workers to highly educated workers, consistent with ICT-based polarization. Trade openness is also associated with polarization, but this is not robust to controlling for Research and Development. Technologies account for up to a quarter of the growth in demand for highly educated workers.