By several indications, anti-immigrant sentiment-long an undercurrent in American social history-most recently resurfaced in the mid-2000s. One indicator was adamant opposition to further immigration on the part of an increasingly vociferous minority, anywhere from one-fifth to one-quarter of those polled in public opinion surveys . . .

The economic crisis that began in 2008 had multiple implications for retirement behavior. The stock market crash may have caused some individuals to defer retirement because of losses they experienced in their 401(k)-type retirement plans. The spike in unemployment may have led others to retire sooner in response to a job loss or the inability to find work. Coile and Levine (2007, 2009, and 2010) provide evidence of both types of behavior. By the end of 2010, however, the stock market had nearly rebounded to pre-crash levels. Although the market still may be below what individuals had expected and there may have been some short-term impacts, the markets sharp rise has substantially diminished the importance of this part of the story. The weakness in the labor market, however, continues to be extensive and persistent. The purpose of this analysis is to focus on its implications for retirement and retiree well-being in the coming years.

This article examines the effects of specialized knowledge on the geographic concentration of occupations across US metropolitan areas. Controlling for a wide range of other attributes, empirical results reveal that occupations with a unique knowledge base exhibit higher levels of concentration than those with generic knowledge requirements. This result is robust to the use of several model specifications and instrumental variables estimation that relies on an instrument set representing the means by which people acquire knowledge. Thus, the study suggests that the benefits of labor market pooling are particularly apparent in cases where workers require a specialized knowledge base.

New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have long been shaped by immigration. These gateway cities have also been the major flashpoints in American debates over immigration policy. Since the 1980s, however, new immigrants have increasingly settled in rural and suburban areas, particularly within the South. Couple this demographic change with the increase in the number of unauthorized immigrants, and the rural South, once perhaps the most culturally and racially settled part of the country, now offers a window into the changing dynamics of immigration and, more generally, the changing face of America. New Destination Dreaming explores how the rural context impacts the immigrant experience, how rapid Hispanic immigration influences southern race relations, and how institutions like schools and law enforcement agencies deal with unauthorized residents. Though the South is assumed an economically depressed region, low-wage food processing jobs are offering Hispanic newcomers the opportunity to carve out a living and join the rural working class, though this is not without problems. Inattention from politicians and black-brown tensions are both salient in contemporary rural southern life, and they require serious attentionfrom whites, blacks, and newcomers alikeif intergroup relations and community trust are to be improved. Ultimately, Marrow presents a cautiously optimistic view of Hispanic newcomers opportunities for upward mobility in the rural South, while underscoring the threat of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictive policy-making that has gripped the region in recent years. Lack of citizenship and legal status still threatens many Hispanic newcomers opportunities. This book uncovers what more we can do to ensure that Americas newest residents become productive and integrated members of rural southern society rather than a newly excluded underclass.

Blacks and Latinos have developed a complicated set of relationships in a variety of arenas in urban areas scaterred across the Northeast, Midwest, and Southwest. However, the arrival of a large east is causing such interracial relationships to be largely negotiated anew. As one might imagine, the process is far from simple-in a region long dominated by the black-white color line, the presence of a Latino attitudes toward the native born (see chapter 2, this volume). Consequently, different segments of the black community respond different to the Hispanic presence.

This dissertation is about the rise in income inequality over the last three or four decades. The introductory chapter motivates the rest of the dissertation by dis- cussing three stylized facts about rising inequality and by contrasting two alternative explanations for this trend. The ?rst, and more traditional, explanation is that the demand for skills is increasing faster than the supply of those skills. Given workers in this story cannot update their skills, this leads to increasing skill wage gaps and subsequently to an overall widening of the income distribution. An alternative story, introduced in this dissertation, is not skills-based but is task-based. In this story, workers can update the bundle of tasks they supply to the market but task wages do not equalize because frictions in the task adjustment process prevent workers from doing so. In the model these task wage gaps translate into overall income inequality. This change in emphasis from skills to tasks has important policy implications for addressing inequality. The second chapter develops and tests this ?non-Ricardian? model of equilibrium task supply where such tasks are the proximate inputs to production. In the model, ex ante identical workers choose task supply and identical, competitive ?rms choose task demand. The model predicts that changes in task supply adjustment costs drive changes in the income distribution by creating a wedge between task wages. These predictions of the non-Ricardian model are veri?ed in the data. Where the predictions of the model are in con?ict with the canonical model of the wage distribution, the non-Ricardian models performs better empirically. Working through the mechanisms of this empirically validated model, increased task adjustment costs can explain much of the recent rise in income inequality. Chapter three demonstrates that task adjustment costs are an important economic quantity. In this chapter, I characterize task-speci?c human capital as the abilities required to complete tasks performed on the job and then I de?ne a task knowledge space where distances between jobs can be measured. To show the transferability of task-speci?c human capital, I use the tools of program evaluation to explore the e?ect of losing varying amount of task-speci?c human capital on displaced workers from the PSID data. Not only do displaced workers who switch tasks post-displacement see substantial long-run drops in earnings, those losses in earnings are larger the more di?erent their post-displacement job is from their pre-displacement job, with respect to the tasks performed in the job. Using common estimates of discount rates and amortizing, this loss amounts to a lifetime cost of around 7 log points of earnings per year for workers that move the median distance in task space post-displacement (relative to those displaced workers that do not switch tasks). This chapter also validates the only novel assumption in the model of chapter two thus making counter- factual analysis with that model more credible. Some of this task-speci?c human capital is lost when workers change careers, in- dustries, occupations, employers and jobs while some of it is maintained when the worker moves about the labor market. Previous authors have associated this loss of human capital with labor market turbulence and others link increases in turbulence with increases in wage inequality. Chapter four explores the link between task-speci?c human capital and worker's decisions to navigate about the labor market over their careers. The chapter shows that depending on initial conditions, changes in the trans- ferability of task-speci?c human capital can result in increases in income inequality. The chapter also discusses other trends that may account for the increase in task adjustment costs.

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in the Child Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit on labor force participation and hours worked among mothers. I focus on three periods: the late 1990s when the policy was first introduced, the early 2000s when the Child Tax Credit per dependent expanded, and the late 2000s when the earned income threshold level to receive the tax credit was lowered to allow more tax-filers with children to qualify for the credit. The predicted loss in tax revenue to the government by this tax credit in 2010 alone was $52 billion. I examine the effect of the total tax credit on labor force participation and hours worked among women using difference-in-difference regressions with women with no children as the control group since they do not qualify for the Child Tax Credit and women with children as the treatment group. I find an increase in labor force participation and hours worked, conditional on working, among single mothers relative to single women with no children following the introduction of the Child Tax Credit, but no significant change in the subsequent years surrounding the expansions of the tax credit.

In this paper, I estimate the effect of state school inputs on labor market returns to schooling. The method follows Card and Krueger (1992) and Heckman et al. (1996), but I extend their analysis in two ways. First, I correct state-level returns to schooling for selective migration, adapting a method from Dahl (2002). Second, I use more recent data and assess the degree to which the 1999 labor market capitalized school inputs (with 2000 Census data). Higher state-level school inputs are associated with higher returns to schooling after correcting for selective migration. These positive effects are present in all Census years I study. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Structural needs for immigrant labour in health care, restaurant, tourism, agricultural and other economic sectors, together with harsher economic circumstances in most sending countries, almost certainly ensure the continuation of large-scale immigration

Despite many major policy innovations aimed at reducing Black-Americans‘ economic disadvantage since 1965, Black-Americans, as a minority ethnic group, have still fallen behind economically relative to other groups. In an attempt to provide policy recommendations for improving the plight of economically disadvantaged minorities in United States, this paper examines the returns to education in 1960, 1980 and 2008 for a group that has been successful in the labor market, Asian-Americans, and compares them to their non-Hispanic White counterparts. Under Mincer‘s Human Capital Earnings Function (HCEF), this paper pools the 1960 1% census sample, 1980 5% census sample and 2008 1% American Community Survey sample and uses a least squares approach in the analysis. The outcome of the empirical study shows that Asian-Americans, especially males, have higher returns to post-secondary education. This holds true even if we account for country of origin and diploma-earning effects.

In January 2010, President Obama proposed a budget that would transform Poll Grants into entitlements, on the model of Medicare or Social Security. This change would extend the college funds that Poll Grants provide to an additional one million students. This proposed entitlement is based on the idea that everyone with the desire to go to college should be able to do so (Parsons 2010). This idea has reshaped higher education in the United States in a very short historical period, turning what was a guildlike activity into an industry for mass-producing credentials. In this article, I make the case for an alternative to the conventional view expressed in the president's proposal. My examination of the evidence and my own experiences in higher education have led me to conclude that massive federal subsidies have changed the higher-education industry and have produced a number of negative consequences. I describe these changes and lay out their consequences. This article, then, provides a response to the position taken by policy analysts and economists such as Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz (2008) that a race between education and technology requires extensive federal investment in higher education as well as a response to the popular view that putting more individuals through college is necessarily a good thing.

This paper examines the effects of migration on malaria deaths in the early 20th century United States. Specifically, we estimate the impacts of inter-county migration on changes in the malaria death rate between 1930 and 1940, using a quasi first-difference model. In order toaddress endogeneity, we instrument migration rates with Agricultural Adjustment Act expenditures. We find that counties that experienced a greater outflow (inflow) of migrants had a relatively lower (higher) malaria death rate in 1940. Given the patterns of population movement, these results suggest that migration played an important, but secondary, role in malarias eradication from the United States.

This paper provides new empirical evidence about how workers locations affect measurements of earnings inequality (and their changes over time) in the United States. Part of the inequality observed in any given U.S. sample is due to the fact that workers with different skills (and therefore earnings) are not distributed symmetricallyacross locations that are more and less productive (and therefore pay higher and lower wages). In particular, I estimate that a significant and rising proportion of the college wage premium is due to college graduates living in and moving toward higher-paying locations than high school graduates. Furthermore, I assess the impact of location on real wage inequality (adjusting for local costs of living). The higher wages that college graduates enjoy as a result of their location choices are mostly counterbalanced by higher costs of living. From this, I infer that college graduateschoose to live in more economically productive labor markets than do workers with less education, but college graduates are not necessarily more capable of exploiting locational wage differences for their own advantage.

What is it about the U.S. economy in recent decades that has allowed both the laborforce participation rate of women and the total fertility rate to increase simultaneously,as though life as a mother and life as a working woman no longer conict with oneanother? I study the importance of child care cost in answering this question. Childcare workers' wages have stayed low for decades, keeping the price of child care low.This may have induced the increased use of child care services, enabling more women tobe working mothers and bringing about the increased labor supply of women withoutcausing decreases in fertility. I develop a simple household model, and calibrate itto some of the main cross-sectional features of modern households. The calibratedmodel predicts a stable path of fertility from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, whilealso predicting increases in labor supply during the same period. It is less successfulin more recent years. Counterfactual calculation indicates that, if child care workers'wages had grown at a rate equivalent to the median wage of young women, U.S. fertilitywould have been substantially lower during the 1980s and the early 1990s, while theparticipation rate would have changed very little. The same model can successfullyreconcile the case of Japan: the increasing labor supply of women and rapidly fallingfertility under a very stable wage distribution since 1980. Lastly, I embed the householdmodel in a general equilibrium framework and calibrate it for two purposes: i) to gaina quantitative sense of the e ects of policy changes in the U.S. since 1980, and ii) tocalculate the potential e ects of low-skill immigrants on the Japanese economy.

Hispanic immigration strongly impacts Florida's economic and demographic identity, whose population is projected to become the third largest in the US by 2020. The results from dozens of standard OLS multiple regressions suggest that foreign-born males typically "americanize" within 15 years of arrival in Florida: in accord with Barry Chiswick's broader, years-since-migration variable. English proficiency, occupational scores and ethnicity are just three of the socioeconomic variables used to identify trends in upward mobility and underscore the challenges of Hispanic integration.

Objective To investigate how birthplace influences the incidence of papillary thyroid cancer among Asian American women.Methods Birthplace- and ethnic-specific age-adjusted and age-specific incidence rates were calculated using data from the California Cancer Registry for the period 19882004. Birthplace was statistically imputed for 30% of cases using a validated imputation method based on age at Social Security number issuance. Population estimates were obtained from the US Census. Incidence rate ratios (IRR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated for foreign-born vs. US-born women. Results Age-adjusted incidence rates of papillary thyroid cancer among Filipina (13.7 per 100,000) and Vietnamese (12.7) women were more than double those of Japanese women (6.2). US-born Chinese (IRR = 0.48, 95% CI: 0.400.59) and Filipina women (IRR = 0.74, 95% CI: 0.580.96) had significantly higher rates than those who were foreign-born; the opposite was observed for Japanese women (IRR = 1.55, 95% CI: 1.172.08). The age-specific patterns among all foreign-born Asian women and US-born Japanese women showed a slow steady increase in incidence until age 70. However, among US-born Asian women (except Japanese), substantially elevated incidence rates during the reproductive and menopausal years were evident.

I used population data from your website and as proposed Id like to submit my diploma thesis which I completed recently at the University of Vienna, Austria, Europe.The title of my thesis is: The danger of tornadoes in the United States a spatial and temporal analysis of tornado touchdown points using geographic information systems and spatiotemporal statistics. Advisor: Michael Leitner, PhD MA, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA, U.S.A.Philip Glasner philip.glasner@univie.ac.at

Using a newly constructed individual-level dataset, we analyze the relative incarceration probabilities of native and foreign-born men between 1900 and 1930. We find that the foreign-born were less likely to be incarcerated thannatives even after controlling for age and literacy. However, immigrants seemed to assimilate rapidly to the incarceration patterns of the native born. The likelihood that an immigrant was incarcerated was increasing in his time spent in the U.S. and the children of immigrants had incarceration rates that were the same or even higher than those of their peers with native parents. Finally, wefind that odds of incarceration were lower for immigrants who arrived in the 1920s after the imposition of immigration restrictions and quotas than for those who had arrived earlier.