This study aimed to test the healthy immigrant hypothesis and assesshealth heterogeneity among newly arrived working-age immigrants (1864 years)from various regions of origin. Using the 5% sample of the 2000 U.S. Census(PUMS), we found that, compared with their native-born counterparts, immigrantsfrom all regions of the world were less likely to report mental disability and physicaldisability. Immigrants from selected regions of origin were, however, more likely toreport work disability. Significant heterogeneity in disabilities exists among immigrants:Those from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia reported the highest risk ofmental and physical disability, and those from East Asia reported the lowest riskof physical disability. Furthermore, Mexican immigrants reported the lowest risk ofmental disability, and Canadian immigrants reported the lowest risk of work disability.Socioeconomic status and English proficiency partially explained these differences.The health advantage of immigrants decreased with longer U.S. residence.

Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshalls theories of industrialagglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, orcoagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturingindustries from the Economic Census. We then relate coagglomerationlevels to the degree to which industry pairs share goods, labor, or ideas.To reduce reverse causality, where collocation drives input-output linkages orhiring patterns, we use data from UK industries and from US areas where thetwo industries are not collocated. All three of Marshalls theories of agglomerationare supported, with input-output linkages particularly important.

Occupational gender segregation is astrong feature of the US labor market.While some occupations have become increasinglyintegrated over time, others remainhighly dominated by either men orwomen. Our analysis of trends in overallgender segregation shows that, after a considerablemove towards more integratedoccupations in the 1970s and 1980s,progress has completely stalled since themid 1990s. Occupational segregation is aconcern to policy makers for two reasons:it is inefficient economically, preventingable people from moving into occupationswhere they could perform well and thatwould satisfy them more than the onesopen to them. And occupational segregationis a major cause for the persistentwage gap. Our analysis confirms that averageearnings tend to be lower the higher the percentage of female workers in an occupation, and that this relationshipis strongest for the most highly skilled occupations, such as medicine or law. Yet this is also a strong feature of jobsrequiring little formal education and experience, increasing the likelihood of very low earnings for women working infemale-dominated, low-skilled occupations such as childcare.

How significant was the economic progress of African Americans in the United States between1970 and 2000? In this paper the authors examine this issue for black men 25 to 55 years of agewho live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. They present evidence that significant racial disparitiesremain in education and labor market outcomes of black and white men, and they discusschanges in industrial composition, migration, and demography that might have contributed to thestagnation of economic progress of black men between 1970 and 2000. In addition, the authorsshow that there was no progress in the financial well-being of black children, relative to whitechildren, between 1970 and 2000.

The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 changed the U.S. income tax structure in a dramatic fashion. In particular, these two reforms reduced the marginal tax rates for married households. In this paper I investigate what part of the rise in labor force participation of married women between 1980 to 1990 (a rise of 13 percentage points) can be accounted by the changes in taxes. I build an heterogeneous agent model populated by married households. Households differ by age and educational attainment levels of their members and decide whether the second earner, the wife, should participate in the labor market. I select parameter values so that the model economy is consistent with the 1980 U.S. economy in terms of income tax structure, wages (skill premium and gender gap), marital sorting (who is married with whom), and female labor force participation. Using counterfactual experiments I find that 2024 percent of the rise in married female labor force participation is accounted for by the changes in the income tax structure. Changes in wages account for 6264 percent, and changes in marital sorting account for 1416 percent of the rise in the participation rate of married women.

The national data show that there are disparities across racial and ethnic groups in several aspects of life including employment, with white people typically experiencing better outcomes (Wilson, 2009; Smiley, 2006). Not surprisingly, these disparities are also pronounced among people with disabilities (Allen & Aranglo-Lasprilla, 2010). The purpose of this article is to highlight disparities between white people and black people with cognitive disabilities, and to identify promising practices emerging in some American states.

How significant was the economic progress of African-Americans in the U.S. between 1970 and 2000? In this paper we examine this issue for black men 25-55 years old who live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. We present the evidence that significant racial disparities remain in education and labor market outcomes of black and white men. We discuss changes in industrial composition, migration, and demographic changes that might have contributed to the stagnation of economic progress of black men between 1970 and 2000. In addition, we show that there was no progress in a financial well-being of black children, relative to white children, between 1970 and 2000.

Using an extensive set of establishment and individual data, we estimate the extent to which thevariance of earnings among establishments increased in 1977-2002 and its contribution to theincreased dispersion of US earnings among individuals. We find that more than 70 percent of theincrease in the variance of earnings in this period occurred across establishments. More than twothirds of the growth in establishment wage dispersion arises from changes within detailedindustry and region. Two industries contributed disproportionately to earnings inequality.Business services accounted for a growing share of the total variance in log earnings acrossplants, while the increased variance in earnings in finance, insurance, and real estate accountedfor one-fifth of the growth in variance in the whole economy.Decomposing the increase in earnings among establishments between rising inequalityamong existing establishments and changes in inequality due to the earnings of establishmentsthat enter or exit the economy we find that the bulk of the increase occurred among existingestablishments. We reject explanations that attribute the increase in the variance amongestablishments to increased returns to human capital or increased sorting of observable skillsacross plants. The factor most closely related to the increased dispersion in earnings across plantsis the increase in the dispersion in labor productivity among plants. Evidence of rent sharing andof the growing importance of inter establishment wage dispersion run, given the decliningstrength of union, counter to the usual analysis of wage-setting in a competitive market.JEL Codes: J3; J31; D3 KeyWords:Wage inequality; productivity and wages

This analysis has three major purposes: 1.Which sources of income have contributed to total personal income inequality in the US in 2008? In this section we will utilize statistical tools developed by Shorrocks (1982) and extended by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985). 2. Which population groups have influenced inequality and how much? Has the personal income gap between men and women, whites and non-whites, or between groups with different levels of educational attainment contributed significantly to personal income inequality? To answer this question, we decompose overall inequality into measures which assess within-group inequality, between-group inequality and a measure which identifies overlap among the groups. Statistical tools by Blinder (1973), Oaxaca (1973) and Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985) are utilized in this section. 3. Which factors have contributed to inequality? While the group analysis allows us to consider the contributions of various characteristics separately (e.g. gender, race, educational attainment, labor force participation and age), we want to consider all these factors simultaneously. We address this question using regression-based methods, decomposing inequality by various factors that we expect to influence personal incomes. Logistic regression is employed to calculate the impact of the factors on the odds and probability of enjoying an above median income.

This paper examines whether the differential labor supply response of mothers and fathers by child gender varies between immigrants and natives and over racial and ethnic subgroups using the 19902000 Census and 19942008 March CPS supplement. We find that immigrants worked fewer weeks and hours per year if they have a son rather than a daughter. However, even the effect of having a son versus a daughter varies by whether or not the parents emigrated from an Asian country or another part of the world. We also find evidence in the CPS that the effect of child gender on mens labor supply is different for different racial groups, suggesting that son preference may be persistent even when the economic rationale for son preference no longer exists.

In this paper we show that the two major developments experienced by the US labor market - rising inequality and narrowing of the male-female wage gap - can be explainedby a common source: the increase in price of cognitive skills and the decrease in price of motor skills. We obtain the price of a multidimensional vector of skills by combining a hedonic price framework with data on the skill requirements of jobs from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and workers wages from the CPS. We find that in the 1968-1990 period the returns to cognitive skills increased 4-fold and the returns to motor skills declined by 30%. Given that the top of the wage distribution of college and high school graduates is relatively well endowed with cognitive skills, these changes in skillprices explain up to 40% of the rise in inequality among college graduates and about 20% among high school graduates. In a similar way, because women were in occupations intensive in cognitive skills while men were in motor-intensive occupations, these skill price changes explain over 80% of the observed narrowing of the male-female wage gap.

Age based school entry laws force parents and educators to consider an important tradeoff: though students who are the youngest in their school cohort typically have poorer academic performance, on average, they have slightly higher educational attainment. In this paper we document that for a large cohort of California and Texas natives the school entry laws increased educational attainment of students who enter school early, but also lowered their academic performance while in school. However, we find no evidence that the age at which children enter school effects job market outcomes, such as wages or the probability of employment. This suggests that the net effect on adult labor market outcomes of the increased educational attainment and poorer academic performance is close to zero.

Having health insurance is a crucial factor for many to sustain life in America. This studyexamines the demographic determinants of health care coverage within the United States with afocus on how gender and marital status influence the likelihood of having health insurance. Usingthe human capital theory and the theory of statistical discrimination, it is predicted that marriedfemales will have a higher probability of being insured than divorced and separated females. Also,divorced males are predicted to have a higher probability of coverage than divorced females. Thedata for this research is retrieved from the United States Census Bureau Current PopulationSurvey and consists of a large sample of adults aged 30 to 65. An OLS and probit regression areused to conduct this study, as well as descriptive statistics. The principle finding is that marriedadults have a much higher probability of having insurance than single, divorced, and widowedadults. It is also found that men and women do not differ greatly in their likelihood of havinghealth insurance. One exception is that single, divorced and widowed women are somewhat lesslikely to have employer provided insurance than their male counterparts.

In every society for which we have data, people’s educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents’ education or with other indicators of their parents’ socioeconomic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified during recent decades, not least thanks to better data having become accessible to researchers. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and evaluate recent empirical research on education and family background. Broadly speaking, we focus on two related but distinct motivations for this topic. The first is equality of opportunity. Here, major the research issues are: How important a determinant of educational attainment is family background, and is family background – in the broad sense that incorporates factors not chosen by the individual – a major, or only a minor, determinant of educational attainment? What are the mechanisms that make family background important? Have specific policy reforms been successful in reducing the impact of family background on educational achievement? The second common starting point for recent research has been the child development perspective. Here, the focus is on how human-capital accumulation is affected by early childhood resources. Studies with this focus address the questions: what types of parental resources or inputs are important for children's development, why are they important and when are they important? In addition, this literature focuses on exploring which types of economic policy, and what timing of the policy in relation to children's social and cognitive development, are conducive to children's performance and adult outcomes. The policy interest in this research is whether policies that change parents' resources and restrictions have causal effects on their children.

The introduction and diffusion of personal computers are widely viewed as a technological revolution. Using U. S. metropolitan area-level panel data, this paper asks whether links between PC adoption, educational attainment, and the return to skill conform to a model of technological revolutions in which the speed and extent of adoption are endogenous. The model implies that cities will adjust differently to the arrival of a more skill-intensive means of production, with the returns to skill increasing most where skill is abundant and its return is low. We show that the cross-city data fit many of the predictions of the model during the period 1980-2000, the PC diffusion era.

Multiracial individuals and mixed race households show different residential locationpatterns depending on the races of the groups involved and the ways in which peoplereport their mixed racial heritage. In this research, we focus on multiracial andinterracially married American Indians in recent decades. Although they aresubstantively interesting, American Indians and multiracial people are rarelyrepresented in social science research on residential location and segregation. UsingU.S. public-use microdata from four decades (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2008), we map thelocations of two groups of multiracial American Indians and two groups of interraciallymarried American Indians, in comparison to their single-race counterparts. In 1980 and1990, we measure multiracial using the respondents answers to both the race and theancestry census questions. Our disaggregation of different types of mixed-raceAmerican Indian households extends the work of Wong (1998, 1999) and Wright et al.(2003) to reflect current sociological knowledge about the varieties of experiences ofpeople in different multiracial situations. By doing so, this research advances knowledgeabout the social context of race and identity in the contemporary United States.

Given a spatial dataset placed on an n × n grid, our goal is to find the rectangular regions within which subsets of the dataset exhibit anomalous behavior. We develop algorithms that, given any user-supplied arbitrary likelihood function, conduct a likelihood ratio hypothesis test (LRT) over each rectangular region in the grid, rank all of the rectangles based on the computed LRT statistics, and return the top few most interesting rectangles. To speed this process, we develop methods to prune rectangles without computing their associated LRT statistics.

Average annual earnings of black US households have remained at around half the average earnings of white households for more than 30 years. Why are the earnings of black households so low compared to those of white households? Why can black-white earnings inequality of such magnitude be permanent? This paper provides a quantitative answer based on neighborhood effects. The economic and demographic characteristics of neighborhoods and the distribution of earnings are determined endogenously from the location and investment decisions of altruistic parents. Permanent racial inequality arises from residential segregation by race and earnings coupled with neighborhood effects that impact the productivity of parental investments. The model is calibrated by targeting observed segregation by race, segregation by earnings, housing price differences across neighborhoods, intergenerational earnings mobility, and the magnitude of parental investments in children. The benchmark steady state earnings distribution accounts for .72 of the observed black-white percent difference in household earnings. The paper argues that local housing markets, local human capital externalities and racial neighborhood preferences are necessary ingredients in explaining permanent black white inequality.