This article estimates the effect of armed conflict exposure on school drop-out and labor decisions of Colombian children between the ages of 6 and 17. The empirical strategy is based on two-stage duration analysis and biprobit estimations that take into account the endogeneity of conflict. We find that conflict affects children older than 11, inducing them to drop out of school and enter the labor market too early. We find that short-term exposure to violence is the most relevant for these decisions and probable channels of transmission include higher mortality risks, negative economic shocks, and lesser school quality.

Despite the end of the Great Recession, American families still rely on the income of wives at record levels, with employed wives’ contribution to total family income holding steady at 47 percent, which is its highest level in decades, according to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

This paper examines whether the earnings of older US workers track overall increases in TFP as comprehensively as those of their younger colleagues. The US population is aging: longevity is increasing, while fertility is, if anything, trending in the opposite direction. If the marginal product of younger workers rises proportionately with TFP but the marginal product of older workers lags behind, then innovation will, in effect, tend to diffuse more slowly as the labor force ages. Retirement timing may be influenced as well. In general, as longevity rises, we expect both work lives and retirement spans to increase. Workers optimal allocations of extra years of life between career and retirement will, however, be sensitive to the rate of pay available. In fact, we find that the pay of older US employees does not follow TFP growth as closely as the remuneration of younger workers though the difference is, perhaps, surprisingly small and we attempt to provide quantitative assessments of the likely impact on the economy...

Both large-scale immigration and rapid expansion of the railroad network played major roles in the economic development of the United States during the second half of the 19th century. Although the romance of the settlement of the West has received much attention in the literature, the northeast remained the industrial powerhouse of the continent, attracting large numbers of immigrants to work in its mines, factories and mills, despite the growing ascendancy of Chicago. However, new research using the complete count US 1880 census dataset demonstrates that until the latter part of the period, the US railroad industry and its associated employment opportunities were also heavily concentrated in the northeast region. This paper examines the interrelationships between processes of immigration and railroad development, in terms of the movement of people and the availability of employment opportunities, and presents evidence that different ethnic groups participated in the railroad industry to markedly varying degrees.

Op-ed article on the challenges faced by immigrant elders.

In the last several decades, the myth of the homogenous suburb has eroded. This is especially true for immigrants. In 2000, researchers discovered that 52 percent of immigrants in metropolitan areas were living in suburbs. One facet of this transformation has attracted less scrutiny: over the last quarter century, hundreds of thousands of Asian migrants have arrived in the suburbs.

We provide the first comprehensive documentation of enactment by U.S. states of two types of Acts removing married women's legal impediments in the economic sphere: the Married Women's Property Acts (MWPAs) and the Earnings Acts (EAs). We identify MWPAs that granted married women the right to own and control real and personal property, and Earnings Acts that granted married women the right to own and control their market earnings. Such Acts were passed by most states between 1850 and 1920, and were critical in weakening the patriarchal common-law doctrine of coverture. Scholars studying the Acts causes and consequences have used different enactment dates. We describe a three-step method for determining accurate dates of passage, apply that method to the contiguous 48 states, uncover dates not listed in previous studies, and show how our dates differ from the present published lists. We also show how enactment varied across regions, and across states with different marital property regimes. We relate Act timing to social changes occurring at those times, such as women's suffrage group organizing and the passage of compulsory schooling laws. We hope that our investigation will inform future empirical study of these important legal changes.

This article explores how the efficiency of Internet search is changing the way Americans find romantic partners. We use a new data source, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. Results show that for 60 years, family and grade school have been steadily declining in their influence over the dating market. In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners. The Internet increasingly allows Americans to meet and form relationships with perfect strangers, that is, people with whom they had no previous social tie. Individuals who face a thin market for potential partners, such as gays, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexuals, are especially likely to meet partners online. One result of the increasing importance of the Internet in meeting partners is that adults with Internet access at home are substantially more likely to have partners, even after controlling for other factors. Partnership rate has increased during the Internet era (consistent with Internet efficiency of search) for same-sex couples, but the heterosexual partnership rate has been flat.

Long-term care policy for older Latinos occurs at the intersection of broader policy debates about the funding for long-term care in general, which includes little or no consideration of any racial/ethnic diversity of the population, and debates over issues such as immigration policy and health disparities, which includes little or no consideration of long-term care. Nevertheless, some contemporary efforts around long-term care are likely to benefit older Latinos, while other trends will bypass them. This chapter examines some of the historical trends in long-term care use to identify drivers of long-term care policy and their impact on Latino elders, followed by an overview of current policy trends and information on the perspective of Latino elders and their families as a window into the likely impact of policy changes on disabled older Latinos and their families.

The name from which California is supposedly derived is Calafia, a character in a novel by Garci Rodriguez De Montalvo, first published in 1510. The novel was set on an island completely maintained by African women, and men were only permitted for the express purpose of procreation. Otherwise, women hunted, gathered, and guarded the island. If a male was born, he was killed; but they kept and raised the female children. Rodriguez depicted the leader of this society, Queen Calafia, as the most powerful female of her time. Calafia, in the imagination of Garci Rodriguez, was not only of African origin, but was sexualized and exotic. Her followers were described as having “energetic bodies” with strong physical characteristics. The island presented a safe and utopian community almost completely without men.1 This story is one of the many myths about how California was named. This fictional California was said to be located on the right side of the Indies, and was considered close to the “Earthly Paradise.” Known . . .

More than a year ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that San Marino, a suburb with a population of about 13,000, was the only residential community in Southern California where housing prices actually rose during the recession. The Times attributed this to high-performing schools, luxurious housing stock, and a "small-town ambience." It also mentioned a final factor: the constant and reliable demand for housing there among Asians: But [San Marino] also has something else going for it, real estate experts say: an influx of money from Asian home buyers and investors. "If you go to mainland China and someone asks, 'Where do you live?,' San Marino represents that you are wealthy," said YanYan Zhang, a real estate agent whose clients include overseas buyers looking for homes here. San Marino is an extreme exemplar of a larger process in the region, one thats accelerated in the past 30 years: the development of massive suburban enclaves of Asian immigrants in Southern Californias San Gabriel Valley.

We study the migration policy set by a welfare maximizing government in a model where immigrant workers differ in their skills and are imperfectly matched with heterogenous occupations. The policy fixes a minimum skill level for legal migrants, and foreign workers that fall below it can only enter the country illegally. We start by analyzing under which conditions an amnesty is desirable compared to tolerating undocumented immigrants. Next, we study when it is preferable to have ex-ante lax enforcement, rather than to carry out costly enforcement. We show that three channels play an important role in this decision: an amnesty is more likely the larger are the output gains brought about by the legalization, the less redistributive is the welfare state and the higher is the expected cost of criminal activities carried out by illegal immigrants. Importantly, we also find that, when an amnesty is desirable, the destination country would reach an even higher welfare level investing in enforcement ex-ante.Empirical evidence based on a novel panel dataset of legalization programs carried out by a group of OECD countries between 1980-2007 broadly supports the role played by the channels identified in our theoretical model.

OLAP queries are not normally formulated in isolation, but in the form of sequences called OLAP sessions. Recognizing that two OLAP sessions are similar would be useful for di erent applications, such as query recommendation and personalization; however, the problem of measuring OLAP session similarity has not been studied so far. In this paper we aim at filling this gap. First, we propose a set of similarity criteria derived from a user study conducted with a set of OLAP practitioners and researchers. Then we propose a function for estimating the similarity between OLAP queries based on three components: the query group-by set, its selection predicate, and the measures required in output. To assess the similarity of OLAP sessions we investigate the feasibility of extending four popular methods for measuring similarity, namely the Levenshtein distance, the Dice coe$cient, the tf-idf weight, and the Smith-Waterman algorithm. Finally, we experimentally compare these four extensions to show that the Smith-Waterman extension is the one that best captures the users' criteria for session similarity.

Literature on Mexican immigration to the United States documents the feminization of migration and the need to continue exploring the unique characteristics of this phenomenon. Despite the increasing flow of women migrating from Mexico to the United States and the recognition of this phenomenon in the most up-to-date literature, only a few studies have included the voices and experiences of Mexican immigrant women. Informed by feminist scholarship, a central aim of this project is to make visible the experiences of a sample of Mexican women living in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. This paper is a first step towards understanding their challenges and opportunities, but it is also an effort to learn more about what brought them to the nations capital, a question that is especially interesting because Mexicans are less likely than other Latin American groups to settle in Washington D.C. And while there is ample research on Latin American immigration to Washington D.C. (especially regarding immigration from Central America), Mexican womens settlement and migratory experiences in the region have not been systematically studied. This research includes demographic information of Mexican immigrants in Washington D.C. using the American Community Survey and complements the growing body of migration literature that studies micro-situations to better understand macro-structures of migratory flows. It provides valuable information to advise local debates and public policy.

This dissertation is a collection of three essays examining the relationship between im- migrant political rhetoric and identity among Latinos in the United States. To achieve this task, this study uses empirical evidence from a national survey and original data collected from experiments in New York City and Los Angeles. The first essay identifies three forms of Latino identity most relevant to political decision-making: national origin, pan-ethnic, and American. I find that levels of acculturation as defined by immigrant status and English language strongly predict American identification. Latino identities inform support on im- migrant issues. Latinos with higher perceptions of national origin and pan-ethnic interests are more pro-immigrant on issues pertaining to the rights of undocumented immigrants. The second essay investigates how exposure to explicit and implicit cues within anti- immigrant rhetoric shape the voting decisions of non-Mexican Latino groups in New York City. I test the effects of pan-ethnic, nationality-based, and counter-stereotypical political appeals on candidate support. I find that nationality-based appeals directly or indirectly tar- geting Mexican immigrants do not activate identity in vote choice, only explicit, pan-ethnic cues implicating all Latino immigrants activate “Latino” group interests in voting decisions. The third essay tests whether political processes of collective identity observed among non-Mexicans in New York City are generalizable to Mexican and non-Mexicans in Border States. Conversely, I find that only nationality-based political appeals targeting Mexicans ac- tivate Mexican group interests in vote choice. These results do not extend to non-Mexicans. Anti-immigrant messages did not activate identity in voting. Overall, these findings sug- gest that identity activation in the context of threat may work differently for Mexican and non-Mexican Latino groups in the United States.

We study the migration policy set by a welfare maximizing government in a model where immigrant workers differ in their skills and are imperfectly matched with heterogenousoccupations. The policy fixes a minimum skill level for legal migrants, and foreign workers that fall below it can only enter the country illegally. We start by analyzing under which conditions an amnesty is desirable compared to tolerating undocumented immigrants. Next, we study when it is preferable to have ex-ante lax enforcement, rather than to carry out costly enforcement. We show that three channelsplay an important role in this decision: an amnesty is more likely the larger are the output gains brought about by the legalization, the less redistributive is the welfare state and the higher is the expected cost of criminal activities carried out by illegal immigrants. Importantly, we also find that, when an amnesty is desirable, the destinationcountry would reach an even higher welfare level investing in enforcement ex-ante. Empirical evidence based on a novel panel dataset of legalization programs carried out by a group of OECD countries between 1980-2007 broadly supports the role played by the channels identified in our theoretical model.

U.S. policymakers are concerned that negative home equity arising from the severe housing market decline may be constraining geographic mobility and consequently serving as a factor in the nations persistently high unemployment rate. Indeed, the widespread drop in house prices since 2007 has increased the share of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages. At the same time, migration across states and among homeowners has fallen sharply. Using a logistic regression framework to analyze data from the Internal Revenue Service on state-to-state migration between 2006 and 2009, the authors discover evidence that house lock decreases mobility but find it has a negligible impact on the national unemployment rate. A one-standard deviation increase in the share of underwater nonprime households in the origin state reduces the outflow of migrants from the origin to the destination state by 2.9 percent. When aggregated across the United States, this decrease in mobility reduces the national state-to-state migration rate by 0.05 percentage points, resulting in roughly 110,000 to 150,000 fewer individuals migrating across state lines in any given year. Assuming that all of these discouraged migrants were job-seekers who were previously unemployed before relocating and then found a job in their new state would reduce the nations unemployment rate by at most one-tenth of a percentage point in a given year. The cumulative effect over this period would yield an unemployment rate of 9.0 percent versus 9.3 percent in 2009. Recognizing that not all state-to-state migrants are job-seekers, not all job-seekers were previously unemployed, and not all previously unemployed job-seekers will successfully find work in their new location yields an unemployment rate that is virtually unchanged from the actual one that prevailed from 2006 to 2009.