Despite extensive use of housing data to reveal valuation of non-market goods, the process of house price capitalization remains vague. Using the restricted access American Housing Survey, a high-frequency panel of prices, turnover, and occupant characteristics, this paper examines the time path of capitalization and preference-based sorting in response to air quality changes caused by differential regulatory pressure from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. The results demonstrate that owner-occupied units capitalize changes immediately, whereas rent capitalization lags. The delayed but sharp rent capitalization temporally coincides with evidence of sorting, suggesting a strong link between location choices and price dynamics.

This paper assesses the relationship between occupation attributes and changes in wage inequality ?nding partial support for the computerization hy- pothesis. While wages associated with non-routine cognitive tasks have risen; current versions of the hypothesis cannot explain the pattern of within occu- pation wage changes, the di?erential impact of various types of non-routine cognitive tasks and the declining return to tasks that complement machines. Despite signi?cant employment shifts, occupational composition alone matters little for changes in wage inequality. Changes in wage dispersion within occupa- tions are quantitatively just as important as wage changes between occupations for explaining wage inequality between 1980 and 2000.

The California legislature is currently considering SB 1234, a bill that would create the California SecureChoice Retirement Savings Trusta state-sponsored retirement plan for private sector workers who lackaccess to a workplace plan. Although the plan would technically be a defined-contribution (DC) programbased on an individual retirement account (IRA) platform, assets would be managed in a pooled fund andworkers would be guaranteed a rate of return on their contributions, insured by private underwritersrather than the state. This Policy Brief broadly assesses the feasibility of such a plan by analyzing theprivate cost of guarantees, probable investment returns simulated through a hypothetical pension investmentportfolio, and the long-term funded status of a hypothetical pension plan given conservativeassumptions.

Comparison of Integration of Italian and Mexican Immigrants in the United States of America Mexicans are both the most numerous and one of the most disadvantaged immigrant groups in the United States of America nowadays. Moreover, the proportion of people of Mexican origin in the total population will rise further ahead according to demographic indicators. The combination of these factors makes the issue of the integration of Mexican Americans into the American society particularly topical. This issue is examined by comparison to an older immigrant group – Italian immigrants, who came into the United States between 1890–1930. The objective of this paper is to find out whether the potential of contemporary Mexican and former Italian immigrants to integrate into the American society differs. This research is based on the assumption, that the integrative potential of these immigrants is determined mainly by their socioeconomic status and their social mobility. The crucial part of the paper is therefore the comparison of socioeconomic status of Italian and Mexican immigrants and their children as well as the comparison of their intergenerational social mobility. Further, the author also compares the amount and nature of prejudice faced by former Italian and contemporary Mexican immigrants. On the basis of the comparison mentioned above the author suggests that the integrative potential of Mexican immigrants is not lower than that of Italian immigrants one century ago and therefore Mexicans are able to assimilate into the American society.

There is a tradeoff between risk and expected earnings across occupations. Virtually all occupations require workers to invest in specific skills that tie them to that occupation, but workers face uncertainty about how much they can earn over a lifetime of that type of work. Rational, risk-averse workers will require higher average compensation to enter riskier occupations. This paper estimates the parameters of a model of occupation, labor supply, and consumption choices over the lifecycle with multiple sources of occupation-specific earnings andemployment uncertainty. The estimated model is used to simulate possible lifetime earnings streams for identical workers starting the same occupation and to calculate the expected lifetime earnings from starting in each occupation and the variance around that expectation. The relationship between the expected value and variance of lifetime earnings shows that compensation for earnings risk is a key explanation of variation in expected lifetime earningsacross careers. The measured slope of the risk-return tradeoff is consistent with compensation for earnings risk under reasonable assumptions about the degree of workers risk aversion. As a source of lifetime earnings risk, idiosyncratic, persistent shocks to earnings dwarf business-cycle frequency, occupation-wide shocks. Employment risk, particularly the possibility of changingoccupations and losing the earnings effects of accumulated specific skills, is also an important determinant of lifetime earnings risk.

Immigrants in the U.S. often experience better health than the native-born, and many explanations for this phenomenon center around the positive health behaviors that immigrants bring from their home cultures. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union may be an exception; because they come from societies where unhealthy lifestyles and high mortality are common, they are often expected to experience worse health than the native population. Using data from the Integrated Health Interview Series, I compare FSU immigrants with U.S.-born, non-Hispanic whites on several health measures. FSU immigrants are twice as likely as native whites to report fair or poor health, but they are less likely to smoke or drink, and are less likely to report a functional limitation. FSU immigrants advantage in functional limitation is largely explained by their very high levels of education and marriage, indicating that selectivity is important to understanding the health of this population

We propose the rise of crack cocaine as an explanation for the end to the convergence in black-white educational outcomes beginning in the mid-1980s. After constructing a measure of the arrival of crack arrival in cities and states, we first show there are large increases in incarceration and murder rates after the arrival of the drug. We show that the emergence of crack accounts for between 39 and 71 percent of the fall in black male high school graduation rates. The results suggest that, in line with human capital theory, educational investments declined in response to decreased returns to schooling.

In this paper we analyze the long-run impact of immigration on employment, productivity, and its skill bias. We use the existence of immigrant communities across U.S. states before 1960 and the distance from the Mexican border as instruments for immigration flows. We find no evidence that immigrants crowded out employment. At the same time, we find that immigration had a strong, positive association with total factor productivity and a negative association with the high skill bias of production technologies. The results are consistent with the idea that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP, and also promoted the adoption of unskilled-efficient technologies.

This dissertation develops a network model of migration. While the importance of ties between family members and friends in migration has long been recognized by anthropologists and sociologists and is increasingly confirmed by econometric studies, few economic models of networks in migrations exist. This dissertation introduces a new, flexible tool, agent-based modeling, which it applied to the case of migration between Ecuador and the United States. The agent-based model makes it possible not only to reproduce a wider range of stylized facts for Ecuadorian migration, but also to investigate little-researched phenomena such as clustering and distributions. The first chapter reviews stylized facts for migration world-wide as well as for the case of Ecuador and the U.S. that serve as a guide to the empirical regularities migration models should explain. it outlines the history of economics thought on migration, and discusses prevalent models of migration and their shortcomings with respect to stylizes facts, providing a methodological rationale for using agent-based modeling in economics migration research.The second chapter develops an artificial economy, in which the population moves between three locations, rural and urban Ecuador, and New York. The decision to migrate is determined within a multinomial logit framework by a range of factors identifies in the economic literature of migration, including income differences, overlapping generation elements, and budget and liquidity constraints. However, the key elements in migration decisions are network effects. The simulations generate stable patters and details information on distributions, which reproduce the available data for the geographical population distribution, wealth, debt, and remittances. more innovatively, the model shows the clustering of migrants both at the origin and at the destination that is one of the most pervasive and resilient stylizes facts of migration research. The third chapter applies six remittance theories distilled from the literature to the model. It demonstrated that the various theories fit different aspects of the data, including age-wealth profiles as well as the distribution of the population, and of wealth and remittances. The chapter concludes that a combination of theories is most likely to have the best overall fit to the data.

This paper employs IPUMS United States Census data to study the occupational distribution of immigrants between 1850 and 2000. Examining occupational diversity is crucial to understanding how immigrants adjust to a host economy and affect growth. I use occupations as a way of measuring assimilation. I analyze whether or not the spread of immigrants across occupations looks like the spread of natives over time. To do this, I create a unique measure of diversity based on the fractionalization index. I construct occupational diversity indices for each immigrant group and decade. Results from a case study examination indicate that relative occupational diversity has increased over time as immigrants have a greater ability to enter a wide array of occupations. I use empirical models to show that a positive relationship exists between relative occupational diversity and the immigrant to native ratio.

The censuses in Norway start their history in the 1660s, when the country was part of the Danish Kingdom. After these male censuses were repeated in 1701 full count censuses until 1855 were statistical only, with the exception of the nominative and complete count census in 1801 which covered the whole Kingdom of Denmark, including Iceland, Greenland and Norway. From 1866 population censuses were taken regularly, usually every ten years. The censuses of 1801, 1866, 1900 and 1910 are available for research and statistical use through the Internet, as is also the case for half of the census of 1876. In cooperation with the Minnesota Population Center these censuses were made part of the North Atlantic Population Project (cf nappdata.org). From 1960 anonymous census samples are available from Statistics Norway, while little has been scanned or transcribed from the censuses 1920 to 1950 due to the 100 year confidentiality rule. The last census was conducted in 1990 using sampling methods. In 2001 and 2011 censuses were produced by running computer programs combining variables from the Central Population Register and a number of other databases. The above-mentioned datasets have been used in several research projects, both contemporary and historical. In this article the focus is on historical household structure and migration studies. The Central Bureau of Statistics has a demographic research group, which has worked on such themes as e.g. fertility and cohabitation. The data file combining at the level of the individual the censuses from 1960, 1970 and 1980 is one of their key resources as is the Central Population Register starting in 1964, covering almost the entire population of Norway. A Historical Population Register is being built, presently for the period 1801 to 1815.

In 1960, the manufacturing sector employed about one of every four Americans. Today, it’s one of every 10. In terms of nominal GDP, manufacturing has gone from driving 25 percent of the economy to less than half that over the past 50 years. These trends raise a natural question: Does manufacturing still matter in the U.S. economy? The answer, supplied at a recent conference held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, is a solid “yes,” though it comes with some interesting wrinkles. While it may never provide the employment base or comprise the share of GDP it once did, U.S. manufacturing seems positioned to remain a vital part of the economy for the foreseeable future. That forecast, however, depends on whether the country can implement policies to address potential problems and capitalize on current strengths. The views expressed in this article were largely gleaned from presentations at the May 30-31, 2012, industry conference, Making It in America: Manufacturing Matters, co-sponsored by the National Association for Business Economics and the Cleveland Fed.* The conference focused on the changing dynamics and rebalancing of U.S. manufacturing industry in the global economy.

BackgroundSocio-economic conditions can affect the secondary sex ratio in humans. Mothers under good environmental conditions are predicted to increase the birth rates of sons according to the Trivers-Willard hypothesis (TWH). This study analyzed the effects of ownership and non-ownership of dwellings on the sex ratio at birth (SRB) on a Ugandan sample.Methodology/Principal FindingsOur investigation included 438,640 mothers aged between 12 and 54 years. The overall average SRB was 0.5008. Mothers who live in owned dwellings gave increased births to sons (0.5019) compared to those who live in non-owned dwellings (0.458). Multivariate statistics revealed the strongest effects of dwelling ownership when controlling for demographic and social variables such as marital status, type of marriage, mothers age, mothers education, parity and others.Conclusions/SignificanceThe results are discussed in the framework of recent plausible models dealing with the adjustment of the sex ratio. We conclude that the aspect of dwelling status could represent an important socio-economic parameter in relation to SRB variations in humans if further studies are able to analyze it between different countries in a comparative way.

The central aim of this research is to understand the particular dynamics that affect African American marriage processes with a particular examination of context: Rustbelt, Southwest and New South metropolitan areas. This analysis examines how the demographic profiles of African Americans in three metropolitan areas, Detroit, Phoenix and Atlanta, are linked to the proportions of the never-married populations in these regions and how these demographic profiles have changed over time. Like the general population, the African American population has been shifting over the course of the last 20 years largely due to changes in labor markets. The literature suggests that these population shifts may have an impact on marriage market trends for African Americans in these contexts. Data from the U.S. Census and American Community survey data suggest favorable conditions for marriage transitions in the New South and Southwest and less favorable conditions in the Rustbelt region.

I use a new sample of families linked between the 1860 and 1880 U.S. censuses to study the impact of migration to frontier cities on job holding. Using variation in transportation costs between different regions of the country to generate exogenous migration, I find frontier city migration had significant job-holding benefits. The impact of migration on job holding was 68 percent greater for immigrants than for the native born. Expectations about job holding were the most important factor in the decision to migrate to a frontier city. Clerical workers, unskilledblue-collar workers, immigrants, and the poor were also the most likely to migrate. These results show the benefits of geographic mobility and suggest the contribution of frontier cities to economic opportunity in Americas past.

We document the growth in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop a general equilibrium model with skill-and sector-biased technical change. We assume that higher education suffers from Baumol's (1967) service sector disease, in that the quantity of labor and capital needed to educate a student is constant over time. Finding the models parameters through a combination of calibration and estimation, we show that it can explain the rise in college costs between 1961 and 2009, along with the increase in college attainment and the increase in the relative earnings of college graduates. We finish by using the model to perform a number of numerical experiments.

Purpose – To provide a demographic portrait of Latinos in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Design/methodology/approach – This is a descriptive analysis using published results from the 2010 U.S. Census and authors’ tabulations from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey. Findings – According to the 2010 U.S. Census, more than 700,000 Latinos lived in the Washington metropolitan area. In many ways, Washington's Latino population is unique when compared to Latino populations in other U.S. metropolitan areas. For example, unlike other metropolitan areas, no single Hispanic origin group is in the majority in Washington. And while the largest Hispanic origin group in other metropolitan areas is often of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Dominican origin, in the Washington metro area Salvadorans are the largest group. In other ways too, the Capital Region's Latino population is unique. It has the nation's largest Bolivian community. It has a greater share of immigrants than Latino populations in most other metropolitan areas. It has a higher share of college graduates among its Latino population than any other metropolitan area nationwide. And it is dynamic – growing fast and dispersing across the region. Originality/value – This chapter provides a detailed demographic portrait of Latinos in the Washington, DC, area using the latest data sources available.

In releasing data with sensitive information, a data owner usually has seemingly conflicting goals, including privacy preservation, util- ity optimization, and algorithm efficiency. In this paper, we observe that a high computational complexity is usually incurred when an algorithm conflates the processes of privacy preservation and util- ity optimization. We then propose a novel privacy streamliner ap- proach to decouple those two processes for improving algorithm efficiency. More specifically, we first identify a set of potential privacy-preserving solutions satisfying that an adversary’s knowl- edge about this set itself will not help him/her to violate the pri- vacy property; we can then optimize utility within this set without worrying about privacy breaches since such an optimization is now simulatable by adversaries. To make our approach more concrete, we study it in the context of micro-data release with publicly known generalization algorithms. The analysis and experiments both con- firm our algorithms to be more efficient than existing solutions.