The Minimum wage is a contentious and emotional issue in the United States, and it has been for almost a century. A shothand version of the issue at stake was famously stated by Milton Friedman in Playboy magazine: "A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills" (Normal 1973, re-printed in Friedman 1983, p. 16). Proponents, of course, argue that the purpose of a minimum wage is to ensure that every (covered) worker earns an income that can purchase at least the bare . . .

As the foreign-born have grown more numerous, they have dispersed geographically. Some metropolitan areas have become immigrant gateways for the fi rst time. And within many metropolitan areas, increasing numbers of immigrants have settled in suburban communities, where they were once only a sparse presence.1 Meanwhile, another change has been taking place on the metropolitan landscape: poverty is on the rise in the suburbs. Recent Brookings Institution research shows that at the end of the Great Recession a majority of the nation’s poor in the 100 largest metropolitan areas lived in the suburbs.2 This report examines the intersection of these two trends—the suburbanization of poverty and the suburbanization of the foreign born—with an analysis of Census data from 2000 to 2009. The fi ndings illuminate a new geography of nativity and disadvantage that has developed out of booms, bubbles and busts and challenges traditional thinking about the structure of metropolitan areas and their governance. It is no longer useful to think of central cities as the primary locations of poverty in America, surrounded by concentric suburban rings of predominately white and affl uent populations.3 The interplay of demographic change and economic turmoil has produced a dappled map in which foreign born and native born, poor and non-poor, are scattered and intermingled across the entire metropolitan landscape. As a result, suburbs with little or no experience with either immigration or poverty face complex and unfamiliar public policy challenges.

It is well known that poor countries are much less productive in agriculture than in the rest of the economy, and that it is hard to account for these productivity gaps. In this paper, we study US states during 1980{2009. We find that there are large productivity gaps between agriculture and non-agriculture. These productivity gaps are not at all accounted for by gaps in real wages per efficiency unit, which are similar in the two sectors. Instead, they are accounted for by two key factors: human capital is much higher in non-agriculture; and value added is seriously mis-measured in agriculture.

This article investigates how marital investment, in particular home assets affect divorce rates. Variation in property tax rates across counties in different states is used as an instrument for household asset investment. I find that an increase in one percent in home value serving as a proxy for the amount of marital investment would lower divorce rate for 2 percent for white couples in the United States. Such relationship however does not hold for the black population. This suggests that these two different racial groups might have different economic consideration for forming families. The contemporary family model of public good sharing explains for the behavior of white couples.

Between December 2007, when the U.S. housing and financial crises became the subject of daily news headlines, and July 2011, the civilian unemployment rate nearly doubled, to 9.1 percent from 5.0 percent, while the employment-to-population ratio dropped to 58.1 percent from 62.7 percent—the lowest level seen in more than 25 years. Job losses of this magnitude cause enormous harm to workers, families, and communities.1 For instance, a classic study by economists Lou Jacobson, Robert LaLonde, and Daniel Sullivan found that workers involuntary displaced by plant downsizings in Pennsylvania during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered annual earnings

Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, this book explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of working women before 1940, were excluded from labour protections that formed the foundation of the US welfare state. Looking at the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide, it assesses middle-class women's reform programmes as well as household workers' efforts to determine their own working conditions. Cover; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1 THE TYRANT OF THE HOUSEHOLD: The Debate over the "Servant Question" and the Privacy of the Middle-Class Home, 1870-1915; 2 STICKING TOGETHER THROUGH GOOD TIMES AND BAD: Immigrant Domestic Workers, Ethnic Communities, and Resistance; 3 ENCOURAGING THE GOOD, WEEDING OUT THE BAD, AND TEACHING THE IGNORANT: Women's Organizations and Domestic Workers in New York City, 1870-1915; 4 THE "ENLIGHTENED MAJORITY" VERSUS THE "DIE-HARD FRINGE": The State and Reform of Domestic Service, 1915-1940. 5 EVERY DOMESTIC WORKER A UNION WORKER: Middle-Class African American Organizations and Domestic Workers Confront Labor Exploitation during the DepressionEPILOGUE: The Walls of Jericho; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time. We show how informative bounds can be developed on each of these margins. We apply this analysis to the evolution of hours of work in the US, the UK, and France and show that both the extensive and intensive margins matter in explaining changes in total hours.

This paper examines the effects of education on intermarriage, and specifically whether the mechanisms through which education affects intermarriage differ by immigrant generation, age at arrival, and race. We consider three main paths through which education affects marriage choice. First, educated people may be better able to adapt to different cultures making them more likely to marry outside of their ethnicity (cultural adaptability effect). Second, because the educated are less likely to reside in ethnic enclaves, meeting potential spouses of the same ethnicity may be difficult (enclave effect). Lastly, if spouse-searchers value similarities in education as well as similarities in ethnicity, then the effect of education will depend on the availability of same-ethnicity potential spouses with a similar level of education (assortative matching effect). Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, we find that controlling for the enclave effect, there is empirical evidence for both the cultural adaptability and assortative matching effects. Our estimates also suggest that assortative matching is relatively more important for the native born rather than the foreign born, for the foreign born that arrived young rather than old, and for Asians rather than Hispanics. We provide additional evidence suggestive of our hypotheses and discuss policy implications.

The most fundamental fact about rental housing in the United States is that rental units are overwhelmingly in multifamily structures. This fact surely reflects the agency problems associated with renting single-family dwellings, and it should influence all discussions of rental housing policy. Policies that encourage homeowning are implicitly encouraging people to move away from higher density living; policies that discourage renting are implicitly discouraging multifamily buildings. Two major distortions shape the rental housing market, both of which are created by the public sector. Federal pro-homeownershippolicies, such as the home mortgage interest deduction, weaken the rental market and the cities where rental markets thrive. Local policies that discourage tall buildings likewise ensure that Americans have fewer rental options. The economic vitality of cities and the environmental consequences of large suburban homes with long commutes both support arguments for reducing these distortions.

It is well known that poor countries are much less productive in agriculture than in the rest of the economy, and that it is hard to account for these productivity gaps. In this paper, we study US states during 1980{2009. We find that there are large productivity gaps between agriculture and non-agriculture. These productivity gaps are not at all accounted for by gaps in real wages per efficiency unit, which are similar in the two sectors. Instead, they are accounted for by two key factors: human capital is much higher in non-agriculture; and value added is seriously mis-measured in agriculture.

Although an increase in youth cohort size is often found to exert an upward pressure on the aggregate unemployment rate, Shimer [2001] provides some empirical evidences and a theoretical model to the contrary. We find that the estimated elasticity of unemployment rate is quite sensitive in a fixed effect model, with the inclusion of year dummies, when there is a strong temporal correlation between the youth cohort size and the unemployment rate. Both the sign and magnitude of the estimates vary significantly when using data from different time periods. We propose an alternative way to control for the fixed effects and obtain consistent estimates across the time periods in the United States. Our results support the conventional wisdom of positive correlation between youth cohort size and aggregate unemployment rate. This positive effect of the youth cohort size is strongest for the youngest workers and gradually diminishes for older workers, which implies that the young and the prime age workers are not perfect substitutes to the employers.

Work is a central feature in the stratification of society because it sorts individuals into more or less prestigious occupations; exposes workers to salubrious, dangerous, or stressful environments; and provides earnings that, if adequate, can be converted into wealth, housing, and additional education. Thus, it seems intuitive that work, earnings, and occupations would be associated with broader life chances, including the attainment of long and healthy lives. Our chapter has four major sections. First, we discuss the theoretical and methodological challenges regarding the myriad and multidirectional relationships among work, income, and occupation on one hand, and health and mortality on the other hand. Second, we review some of the major theoretical and empirical findings that link work, income, and occupation to individual mortality in more developed countries. Third, we describe how work, occupation, and income impact mortality in less developed countries where work and social safety net conditions may be quite different than in more developed countries. Finally, we discuss some of the aggregate, historical, and comparative research that links work and income to mortality. Throughout the chapter, we note how gender and the life course shape the relationship between work and mortality.

The economic recession that began in 2007 prompted speculation over its effects on divorce rates in the U.S. Opposing hypotheses suggest either the recession increases divorce through a stress mechanism; or it reduces divorce through increasing its economic costs or strengthening family bonds. I test the relationship between unemployment, home prices and home foreclosures, at the state level, and divorce rates in 2008 and 2009 using the American Community Survey. Results show a decline in divorce rates from 2008 to 2009, but little evidence that higher or rising unemployment or foreclosure rates affected that decline. However, declines in home price were significantly associated with lower divorce rates (except in outlier states). I interpret this as most consistent with the economic cost perspective.

Debates over immigrations impact on less advantaged native workers often ignore industrial structure for creating segregated labor markets and demand for immigrant workers. We analyze population movements of less-educated foreign-born Hispanic, native-born Hispanic, White, and Black men between 1995 and 2000 using MIGPUMA-level 2000 PUMS data. We model in-migration, out-migration, and net migration for each group controlling for demographic composition, employment structure, change in employment structure, labor market indicators, and macro contextual measures. Results indicate positive significant relationships between migration patterns of all groups and support labor demand explanations of internal low-skilled migration emphasizing industrial change rather than labor competition.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of data issues along with a listing of adoption data sources and their limitations. Dara for demographic analysis generally are from three sources: vital statistics or registration data, Census Data, and large scale surveys (Ponston & Bouvier, 2010). In the United States (U.S.) there is no unified vital statistics or registration system for child adoptions despite over 60 years of efforts to obtain asingle accurate registration of . . .