I explore the effects of firms ties to co-national immigrants on foreign entry and performance. I argue that location choice and subsidiary survival are influenced by immigrant social capitalwhich arises from common country bonds and becomes activated when firms co-locate with immigrants of the same nationality in a host location. Moreover, firms respond to and benefit differentially from the resources available through immigrant social capital based on heterogeneity in capabilities, resource needs, and the types of buyers they target. I test these ideas on a sample of foreign investments made by 197 firms from 27 countries into the U.S. between 1998 and 2003. Using a unique set of instruments to account for selection bias, I find strong support for my propositions. This study makes theoretical contributions by showing that immigrant social capital provides firms with location-related advantages and that strategic heterogeneity explains which firms seek out and benefit from social capital. It also has practical implications for managers and policy makers.

This study examines the effect of state minimum wage changes on new and existing business establishments. It employs a refined border approach in conjunction with other differencing methods to control for unobserved heterogeneous area characteristics. The findings suggest that state minimum wage increases deter new establishments from locating in an area, particularly in industries that rely on low-education workforces, such as the retail and manufacturing industries. However, existing establishments,regardless of industry type, are not found to be adversely affected by minimum wage policy.

Recent reports about the stability of marriages appear to yield conflicting conclusions. Wereconcile these estimates, showing that data from several sources uniformly point to increasing maritalstability among those married since the mid-late 1970s.

Male education levels have stagnated for decades, while female education levels have risensteadily. Women now outnumber men in college, with especially large differences among Blacksand Hispanics. We trace the development of racial and gender differences in educationalattainment from high school through college for cohorts born between 1921 and 1988. UsingCensus measures, high school completion rates doubled and college entry and collegecompletion more than quadrupled over this 67-year period. Women as a group increased theiradvantage in high school completion and surpassed men in their college entry and completion.Black women have historically entered and completed college at higher rates than Black males.For the period during which we can measure Hispanic origin, the same is true among Hispanics.The same pattern now holds among Whites, starting with the cohorts born in the 1960s. In theaggregate, two thirds of the change in college entry is explained by changes in high schoolcompletion for those born between 1921 and 1988 but only one third for the cohorts bornbetween 1961 and 1988. Changes in high school completion explain relatively more of thechanges in college entry among Blacks: 90 percent for the cohorts of 1921 to 1988 and almost 50percent for the cohorts of 1961 to 1988 period. High school completion explains slightly morethan half of changes in college entry among Hispanics born from 1961 to 1988. Because menlagged behind women in high school completion, high school completion explains over 74percent of mens increasing college entry for the 1921 to 1988 cohorts (62 percent for women)and roughly one third for the 1961 to 1988 birth cohorts (28 percent for women).

Americans have long viewed homeownership as a symbol of the American Dream, and a defining feature of socioeconomic success. The homeownership rate has risen substantially over the past several decades. However, this increase has accompanied rising inequality in the housing market. Average home values have increased steadily, as has the spread of home values. This paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between rising local median home values and racial/ethnic gaps in homeownership using decennial census data from 1970 to 2000, and the 2009 American Community Survey. Contrary to past studies, I find a positive association between rising home values and homeownership for white households. However, there is a negative relationship for black households, and no difference for Latino households. These results indicate that increasing inequality in housing prices has been a significant contributor to increasing racial and ethnic gaps in homeownership over the last four decades.

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. These improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention levels of pneumoniaas these were the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. These estimates are, ingeneral, larger and more robust to specification for men than for women. With the exception of cognitive disability and poverty for men, the estimates for African Americans are smaller and less precisely estimated than those for whites. This is despite our finding that African Americansexperienced larger absolute reductions in pneumonia mortality after the arrival of sulfa. We suggest that pre-Civil Rights barriers may have inhibited their translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment.

Has the academic achievement gap between students from high-income and low-income families changed in the last few decades? And if so, why?

El geoportal de cartografía y demografía histórica para la ciudad de Madrid pretende crear una Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales (IDE) histórica, realizada siguiendo los estándares y normativa de interoperabilidad del Open Geoespatial Consortium(OGC). Esta IDE está enmarcada dentro de un proyecto de investigación más amplio, dónde el objetivo final es la vinculación de las bases de datos demográficas históricas con la cartografía de Madrid de principios del siglo XX («Plano de Madrid y pueblos colindantes» de Facundo Cañada López, del año 1900), de tal modo que permita representar las variables socio-demográficas de estudio a suficiente nivel de detalle, así como los posteriores trabajos de análisis geoespacial. En la actualidad, las IDE se configuran como la solución tecnológica adecuada para diseminar información geográfica de amplio espectro temático, conocer sus características a través de los metadatos y configurar servicios Web interoperables que posibiliten combinar diferentes fuentes de datos a través de internet.

Since the 1970s almost all US states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. I analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on different family outcomes. My identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across the US states. Estimations based on state panel data suggest that the introduction of joint custody led to an increase in marriage rates, an increase in overall fertility (including a shift from non-maritalto marital fertility), and an increase in divorce rates for older couples. Accordingly, female labor market participation decreased. Further, male suicide rates and domestic violence fell in treated states. The empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that joint custody increased the relative bargaining power of men within marriage.

This article exploits cross-state variation in minimum wages to investigate theimpact of minimum wage changes on employer-provided health insurance. Incontrast to the existing empirical literature, this article considers an environmentwhere some firms are constrained by non-discrimination laws that govern the provisionof health insurance. For these firms, minimum wage changes do not reducethe probability that workers will receive employer-provided health insurance. Forfirms not covered by the non-discrimination law, and free to tailor their fringebenefits, low-skilled workers experience a disproportionate reduction in the availabilityand generosity of health insurance after a minimum wage increase.

The applications and areas which make use of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) grow every year, as the spatial information gets valued. One of the GIS’s applications is for History, through the Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS), whose main researches are concentrated in the Western Europe and the USA. There’s no way to truly understand a historical-geographical phenomena or process without considering both space and time. The GIS has already succeeded in working with the spatial and attributes issue. However, the time modeling issue is stills problem and an opened research field, occurring in many proposed methodologies, suited for each application that one may have for its Temporal GIS. In this paper, it will be presented and criticized five models used in HGIS: layers-divided; time as attribute; date-stamping; space-time composite; three domains. It will have a presentation and a review over HGIS concepts and a post-methodologies presentation deliberation. The conclusion is that there isn’t a methodology capable of performing diachronic queries and answering the questions proposed in the paper, which limits the GIS application to Historical research.

The evolution of education spending in California has received plenty of attention from both academics and practitioners after this state's education finance reform in the 1970's. This paper quantifies the contribution of immigration to the relative decline in elementary and secondary public education spending per student in California in the period 1970-2000. A quantitative model of school choice and voting over public education is used to perform the counterfactual experiments of interest. The model predicts that education spending per student in California would have been 24% higher in the year 2000 if U.S. immigration had been restricted to its 1970 level. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, blackwhite disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolutionof racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contendsthat the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data fromthe 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factorssocial movements, government policies,unionization efforts, and public-employment patternsand that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets.

frica. This was a quantitative, cross-sectional study, with a sample size of 200 healthcare workers (HCWs)(100 Medical, 100 nonmedical staff) from one public tertiary hospital in Pretoria, South Africa. Data were collected using two methods: self-administered questionnaires (demographic characteristics; level of PA; and barriers to exercise) and anthropometric measures (Body weight, height and fitness level). Data were analyzed using SPSS version 17.0. A descriptive statistical method was used to analyze frequencies and chi square test was used to determine level of significance of relationships between different variables and between medical and nonmedical staff. Binary logistic regression was used to determine the association between barriers, attitude, knowledge and PA stages. The majority of staff (73.5%) were overweight! obese, with females being significantly overweight and obese (p<.OS) compared to males. Seventy five percent (75%)of staff were at pre-action stages with more nonmedical staff at pre-action stages compared to medical staff (p<.05) and 81.5% had low fitness level. Eighty three percent (83%) of staff cited lack of motivation and 57% of obese participants misclassified their bodyweight as normal weight. Both barriers and attitude were significant predictors of PA stages of staff (p=0.0l9 and 0.022; Odds ratios of 0.424 and 2.800 respectively) whereas knowledge was not a significant predictor (p0.270; OR = 2.062). However, medical staff had generally good knowledge compared to nonmedical staff (p<.05) but both medical and nonmedical staff had positive attitude towards PA (p<.05). There is high prevalence of obesity and physical inactivity and many barriers exist among healthcare workers which influence their level of physical activity, irrespective of their gender, job categories and age. Employers should seek to eliminate the barriers that discourage use of worksite to increase level of PA.

This paper presents a new framework for human capital measurement. The generalized framework can (i) substantially amplify the role of human capital in accounting for cross-country income differences and (ii) reconcile the existing conflict between regression and accounting evidence in assessing the wealth and poverty of nations. One natural interpretation emphasizes differences across economies in the acquisition of advanced knowledge by skilled workers.

This report gives a brief summary of the evidence of the simultaneous use of different topics in the General Household Survey (GHS) for over-time and cross-country analysis. For this purpose, we shall first give a brief introduction to the structure of the GHS and then providesome examples where different topics in the GHS are used to answer sociological questions with regard to social changes in Britain or in comparison with other countries. We concludethat the GHS has been a unique data source for conducting vigorous analysis that has helped us to gain a deeper understanding of the interrelated nature of the socio-economic factors affecting our lives in the last four decades, a role that could be hardly played by any other government or academic data source.

In this paper, I explore the flexibility of the workweek in the United States, using the FIFA Soccer World Cup as a natural experiment. My empirical strategy exploits the exogenous variation that arises due to which country hosts the World Cup, as this will determine the time games are broadcast across different time zones in the United States. The hour of the day when games are broadcast differentially affects hours of work across different time zones. Further, the calendar timing of the World Cup allows me to compare labor market outcomes in June/July for a worker in World Cup year t, with the outcomes in June/July for a worker in non‐World Cup years t + 1, t + 2 and t + 3. My results highlight the importance of the worker's pay frequency in their workweek flexibility, as all differences in weekly hours of work due to the World Cup are concentrated among salary paid workers. Also, my results show that after controlling for observable demographic characteristics as well as year and month fixed effects, a worker reduces on average his hours of work during the World Cup by statistically significant estimates that range from 9 weekly minutes to 28 weekly minutes, depending on specification choice and time of the day during which World Cup games are broadcast live in the United States.

This chapter presents an empirical analysis of US citizenship acquisition among immigrants from Latin America in the 1990s. While immigrants from Latin America have had historically lower propensity to naturalize than immigrants from other parts of the world, they are observed to experience the largest hikes in naturalization in the 1990s. Welfare and illegal immigration reforms––that made access to public benefits and other selected rights increasingly dependent on citizenship––are among the explanations that have often been offered for the surge in naturalizations in the 1990s. Other explanations include changes in immigration laws in the late 1980s, which allowed large numbers of immigrants to apply for citizenship in the mid-1990s, and anti-immigrant reform attempts (such as in California). The common denominator of the available explanations is that they are about domestic administrative and political changes, and neglect to consider those sending-country policies that might have affected immigrants’ propensity to naturalize in the 1990s. Notably, between 1991 and 1996, some important Latin American sending countries (Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil) changed their laws and granted their expatriates the right to naturalize in the receiving country without losing their nationality of origin. Immigrants from these countries are expected to be more likely to naturalize because of the decrease in a major cost of naturalization, specifically the need to forfeit rights in their country of origin. The analysis presented in this chapter suggests that these laws are associated with an increase of 10 percentage points in the probability of naturalization of immigrants coming from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil. These effects are sizable, explaining one sixth of the overall rise in the naturalization rate of non-Mexican Latin Americans in the 1990s.