This study develops a discrete choice locational equilibrium model to evaluate the benefits of the air quality improvements that occurred in the Los Angeles area following the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). The discrete choice equilibrium approach accounts for the fact that air quality improvements brought about by the 1990 CAAA will change housing choices and prices. The study also provides new evidence for the distributional welfare impacts of the 1990 CAAA in the Los Angeles area. Findings suggest that the air quality improvements that occurred in the Los Angeles area between 1990 and 2000 provided substantial general equilibrium benefits to households. The analysis reveals noticeable differences between partial and general equilibrium welfare gains, demonstrating that ignoring equilibrium effects will likely misrepresent thebenefits of large environmental changes. In addition, we find that the equilibrium welfare impacts of the 1990 CAAA in the Los Angeles area varied significantly across income groups.

Politicians concerned about the decline of the English language have pushed for laws declaring English the official language at both the state and federal level. While no federal legislation has passed, over the past thirty years, 25 states have declared English as their official language. This paper aims to provide one of the first empirical tests of the laws effect on immigrants proficiency in English and wages. Using census bureau data I find no significant impact of the laws on English proficiency in probit and ordered probit regressions, a small effect using a linear probability model and no significant effect on wages from an instrumental variables regression. I also provide evidence of the exogeneity of the laws

Introduction: This report examines demographic and socioeconomic factors concerning Brazilians in the United States between 1980 and 2007. Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates. Results: The wave of migration from Brazil which began in the 1990s in all likelihood will continue into the future, economic fluctuations in the U.S. notwithstanding. In part this is due to the relatively high rates of educational attainment found among the foreignborn Brazilian population of the U.S. Implicit in these high rates is the fact that many migrants possess skills which command salaries in the U.S. that are significantly higher than found in the same professions within Brazil. This has been, without question, a major stimulus to out migration from Brazil. Brazilians with lower levels of educational attainment will probably continue to migrate to the United States because of the extraordinarily low salaries prevailing in Brazil . . .

In this paper, we begin by documenting substantial variation in house price growth across neighborhoods within a city during city wide housing price booms. We then present a model which links house price movements across neighborhoods within a city and the gentrification of those neighborhoods in response to a city wide housing demand shock. A key ingredient in our model is a positive neighborhood externality: individuals like to live next to richer neighbors. This generates an equilibrium where households segregate based upon their income. In response to a city wide demand shock, higher income residents will choose to expand their housing by migrating into the poorer neighborhoods that directly abut the initial richer neighborhoods. The in-migration of the richer residents into these border neighborhoods will bid up prices in those neighborhoods causing the original poorer residents to migrate out. We refer to this process as "endogenous gentrification". Using a variety of data sets and using Bartik variation across cities to identify city level housing demand shocks, we find strong empirical support for the model's predictions.

Shortly after the University of Virginia Press published Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, Bill Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and I participated in a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution. One of our colleagues on the panel, Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania, and a distinguished political philosopher who has written widely about education, democracy, and human rights, prefaced her remarks by referring to a New Yorker cartoon portraying a little boy tugging at Thomas Jefferson’s coattails, looking up at Mr. Jefferson and saying: “If you hold these truths to be self-evident, then why do you keep harping on them so much?”

We present racespecific estimates of home ownership in the United States from 1870 to 2007. For the sample of households considered in this paper, the racial gap in ownership declined by 26 percentage points. Remarkably, 25 points of the long run decline in the gap occurred before World War One.

Numerous generalization techniques have been proposed for privacy-preserving data publishing. Most existing techniques, however, implicitly assume that the adversary knows little about the anonymization algorithm adopted by the data publisher. Consequently, they cannot guard against privacy attacks that exploit various characteristics of the anonymization mechanism. This article provides a practical solution to this problem. First, we propose an analytical model for evaluating disclosure risks, when an adversary knows everything in the anonymization process, except the sensitive values. Based on this model, we develop a privacy principle, transparent l-diversity, which ensures privacy protection against such powerful adversaries. We identify three algorithms that achieve transparent l-diversity, and verify their effectiveness and efficiency through extensive experiments with real data.

The growing education and employment of women are usually cited as crucial forces behind the decline of marriage since 1960. However, both trends were already present between 1900 and 1960, during which time marriage became increasingly widespread. This early period differed from the post-1960 decades due to two factors primarily affecting men, one economic and one demographic. First, mens improving labor market prospects made them more attractive as marriage partners to women. Second, immigration had a dynamic effect on partner search costs. Its short-run effect was to fragment the marriage market, making it harder to find a partner of ones preferred ethnic and cultural background. The high search costs led to less marriage and later marriage in the 1890s and 1900s. As immigration declined, the long-run effect was for immigrants and their descendants to gradually integrate with American society. This reduced search costs and increased the marriage rate. The immigration primarily affected the whites marriage market which is why the changes in marital behavior are much more pronounced among this group than among blacks.

This paper investigates the role of non-cognitive skills in the occupational choices of young workers entering the U.S. labor market. We find entry into male-dominated fields of study and male-dominated occupations are both related to the extent to which individuals believe they are intelligent and have "male" traits while entry into male-dominated occupations is also related to the willingness to work hard, impulsivity, and the tendency to avoid problems. The nature of these relationships differs for men and women, however. Non-cognitive skills (male traits, intelligence, and impulsivity) also influence movement into higher-paid occupations in a similar way for men and women. Finally, we find evidence that supply-side factors may push highly-educated students who have male traits into male-dominated disciplines. Demand-side factors may push highly-educated male workers who tackle problems into male dominated-occupations, while at the same time restraining highly-educated women who are analytical and tackle problems from entering male-dominated occupations. JEL:

Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) impacts all species of North American ash trees, and has caused several million dollars (U.S.) in damage to trees across the affected region. EAB is primarily spread through the movement of trees and wood products, such as nursery stock and firewood. This thesis assessed the potential risk of EAB introduction in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., where the species has not yet been as widely reported. Using a Geographic Information Systems-based approach, a risk prioritization framework was developed to assess and rank various mapped factors for EAB introduction. Results indicated high risk areas throughout the study region with approximately 30 counties being cited for potential risk. From an analysis of risk versus ash basal area for all counties, three management strategies were derived; quarantine, plan harvest, public outreach and monitoring.

Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations across the country. We look at emissions from driving, public transit, home heating, and household electricity usage. We find that the lowest emissions areas are generally in California and that the highest emissionsareas are in Texas and Oklahoma. There is a strong negative association between emissions and land use regulations. By restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions. Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York.

Retaining or hyphenating one's pre-marital surname among brides marrying in Hawaii in 2006, was significantly correlated with average income of women and the average income of men in the bride's state of residence, with only that of women, however, being a marginally-significant predictor where both were used as regression predictors of retention or hyphenation. Older brides were more likely to hyphenate or retain their pre-marital surnames upon marriage in Hawaii in 2006.

How does public policy influence geographic partisan sorting, the increasing tendency for Americans to live in enclaves of like-minded partisans? Standard models attribute the pattern of such changes almost entirely to the aggregate effect of individual citizens homophily: the natural tendency of citizens to be drawn to and cluster with similar individuals. I present an alternative account that suggests that government policies that influence mobility also can influence citizens personal calculus of residential location. To test this hypothesis, I examine the effects of Interstate Highway System on the political development of suburban communities. Combining construction data from the Interstate Highway System with county-level presidential election data for the years 1948-2008, I show that suburban communities with Interstate highways became as much as five points more Republican than they would have been in the absence of freeway constructiona large enough effect to change a swing district to a landslide district. A metropolitan case study based on Wisconsin precinct-level data and a multi-election national analysis of county-level data shows that such political effects emerge quickly after freeway construction, especially in previously undeveloped areas. These findings demonstrate that federal policies can change politics not only by directly influencing individual welfare, but also by influencing residential choice and the spatial relationships among citizens.

The United States is home to about 1.6 million Indian immigrants, making them the third -largest immigrant group in the United States after Mexican and Filipino immigrants. Between 2007 and 2008, the number of Indian immigrants surpassed the number of Chinese and Hong Kong-born immigrants for the first time since at least 1960. Indian immigration to the United States, a fairly recent phenomenon, grew rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s. In addition, people with Indian ancestry have also immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean, East Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Indian immigrants are heavily concentrated in California and New Jersey . . .