In this paper we study the impact of fertility on the overall wellbeing of mothers First, using US Census data for the year 1980, we study the impact of number of children on family arrangements, welfare participation and poverty status. Second, using the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the period 1982-2003, we study the impact on a series of health risk factors. The findings reveal, first, that a raise in family size increases the likelihood of marital breakdown measured by the likelihood of divorce or the likelihood of the mother not living with the childrens father. Second, we find evidence that mothers facing an increase in family size are not only more likely to live with other family members such as grandparents, aunts and uncles, they are also more likely to receive help from welfare programs. Third, consistent with an increase in welfare participation, families (mothers) are more likely to fall below the poverty line, and they face a reduction in total family income. The results using NHIS confirm a negative impact of fertility on marriage stability and an increase in welfare participation measured by an increase in the likelihood of using Medicaid and for some samples a reduction in the take-up of private health insurance. Finally, we find evidence that a shock in fertility increases the likelihood for mothers to suffer from high blood pressure during the last 12 months and also increases the propensity to smoke and risk of being obese.

The institution of marriage has undergone significant changes in recent decades as women have outpaced men in education and earnings growth. These unequal gains have beenaccompanied by gender role reversals in both the spousal characteristics and the economic benefits of marriage.A larger share of men in 2007, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of demographic and economic trend data. A largershare of women are married to men with less education and income.From an economic perspective, these trends have contributed to a gender role reversal in the gains from marriage. In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriageenhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women.

The United States is home to about 1.6 million Chinese immigrants (including those born in Hong Kong), making them the fourth-largest immigrant group in the United States after Mexican, Filipino, and Indian immigrants. Although Chinese immigration to the United States dates back to the 19th century, the Chinese immigrant population grew rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s. Today there are almost as many native-born US citizens who claim Chinese ancestry as there are Chinese immigrants. Chinese immigrants are heavily concentrated in California and New York (for more information on immigrants by state, please see the ACS/Census Data tool on the MPI Data Hub). Compared to other immigrant groups, the Chinese foreign born are better educated and less likely to live in poverty than the immigrant population overall, but Chinese immigrant men are less likely to participate in the labor force than . . .

The twentieth century United States provides a natural experiment to measure the strength and persistence of entrepreneurial cultures. Assuming immigrants bear the cultures of their birth place, comparison of revealed entrepreneurial propensities of US immigrant groups in 1910 and 2000 reflected these backgrounds. According to this test North-western Europe, where modern economic growth is widely held to have originated, did not host unusually strong entrepreneurial cultures. Instead such cultures were carried by persons originating from Greece, Turkey and Italy, together with Jews. The rise of widespread female entrepreneurship provides additional evidence by showing that this trait systematically responded less strongly, but in the same way, to cultural background as did male entrepreneurship.

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and childrens outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solons 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations and elasticities, the literature has placed increased emphasis on the causal mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This chapter describes the developments in the intergenerational transmission literature since the 1999 Handbook Chapter. While there have been some important contributions in terms of measurement of elasticities and correlations, we focus primarily on advances in our understanding of the forces driving the relationship and less on the precision of the correlations themselves.

The link between socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health has been observed consistently and over time (Berkman and Kawachi 2000). According to U.S. census statistics, in 2007, 21.5 percent of Hispanics/Latinos were living in poverty, compared with 8.2 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 24.5 percent of blacks, and 20.3 percent of Asains. In spite of their disproportionate representation among the poor. . .

This paper demonstrates that immigration flows respond to differences in labor market conditions by documenting the systematic change in newly arriving low-skilled immigrants location choices in response to exogenous supply increases among the US- born. In contrast to previous treatments of this question, this paper relies on an identifiable source of exogenous variation that alters the expected returns to entering a labor market. Using pre-reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrant inflows shifted away from cities with more welfare leavers toward cities with smaller reform-induced supply shifts. The empirical methods I use improve upon previous immigrant location studies by explicitly allowing for unobserved city amenities that provide different values based on the immigrants source country. The extent of the selection uncovered is substantial: for each additional native woman working in a city as a result of welfare reform, 0.8 fewer female immigrants choose to live and work there. These results provide direct evidence that selective location choices among immigrants tend to equilibrate labor market returns across geography.

We use macro corss0coutnry data and micro US county level data to demonstrate that resource rich regions have significantly higher labor productivity in manufacturing than resource poor regions, but only slightly lower labor productivity in non-manufacturing. The mechanism suggested by this paper to explain these facts is the process of de-specialization. In a standard Dutch disease story, endowments of natural resources induce labor to move from the (traded) manufacturing sector to the (non-traded) non-manufacturing sector. We argue that in resource rich economies, many of those working in the non-manufacturing sector, are those whose comparative advantage is not in non-manufacturing sector work, whilst those left working in the manufacturing sector are the most suited to manufacturing work. Since manufacturing employs relatively less workers, the impact of shifting labor will be more pronounced within that sector. We construct a two sector, general equilibrium, open economy Roy (1951) model of selection - in the spirit of Lagakos and Waugh (2009). A calibrated version of the model predicts significantly higher output per worker in manufacturing between resource rich and resource poor countries, and somewhat lower output per worker in non-manufacturing - even though countries and sectors have the same aggregate efficiency terms.

Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violent crime in cities and have relied on data with serious limitations regarding nativity information. We analyze administrative data from Pennsylvania prisons, with high-quality information on nativity and demographic characteristics. The latter allow us to construct incarceration rates for detailed population groups using U.S. Census data. The raw gap in incarceration rates for the foreign and native born is large, in accord with the extremely high concern at the time about immigrant criminality. But adjusting for age and gender greatly narrows that observed gap. Particularly striking are the urban/rural differences. Immigrants were concentrated in large cities where reported crime rates were higher. However, within rural counties, the foreign born had much higher incarceration rates than the native born. The interaction of nativity with urban residence explains much of the observed aggregate differentials in incarceration rates. Finally, we find that the foreign born, especially the Irish, consistently have higher incarceration rates for violent crimes, but from 1850 to 1860 the natives largely closed the gap with the foreign born for property offenses.

This paper examines immigrants location responses to variation in states minimum wages over the past 15 years. Canonical models emphasize the importance of labor mobility in evaluating the employment effects of the minimum wage; yet few studies address this outcome directly. The results reveal that low-skilled immigrant workers prefer labor markets with stagnant minimums, and falsification tests using more educated immigrants rule out alternative explanations. This paper therefore constitutes a novel test of whether immigrants select destinations based on expected earnings. Additionally, back of the envelope calculations suggest that this endogenous location selection obscures roughly half of total disemployment effect.Keywords: minimum wage, immigration, labor mobility, spatial equilibriumJEL Classifications: J23, J61, J38

We use data from the National Health Interview Survey (2000-2006) to examine the social determinants of health insurance coverage and access to care for immigrant children by 10 global regions of birth. We find dramatic differences in the social and economic characteristics of immigrant children by region of birth. Children from Mexico and Latin America fare worse than immigrant children born in the U.S. with significantly lower incomes and little or no education. These social determinants, along with U.S. public health policies regarding new immigrants, create significant barriers to access to health insurance coverage, and increase delayed or foregone care. Uninsured immigrant children had 6.5 times higher odds of delayed care compared with insured immigrant children.

Empirical research has consistently shown that married males earn more than single, never-married males.Similar research for women has been scarce and previous literature, based on data from the 1980's and1990's found little or no impact of marriage on female wages. This paper provides the rst in-depth study offemale marriage premium, using two semi-parametric techniques that have not been applied to the marriagepremium literature previously. Selection on observable attributes such as education is examined using cross-section propensity score matching methods. Selection on unobservable characteristics is explored usingHeckman's conditional di erence-in-di erence model. Both techniques create a quasi-experimental dataset, without imposing functional form assumptions or exclusion restrictions. Unlike previous literature, thisstudy uses recent data, from 2001-2007 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The resultsindicate that women with higher earning potential are more likely to get married, leading to a positive andsigni cant marriage premium amounting to 11 percent. The premium is earned only by women with atleast a few years of college education. Black women earn 9 percentage points higher premium than Whitewomen. The results, in light of earlier evidence suggest an interesting development in the female marriagepremium which has important implications on the gender role specialization and division of labor practicedwithin families, speci cally in the presence of children.

Previous research has found that same-sex couples are more likely to be in interracial/ethnicpartnerships than are different-sex couples. Drawing on search theory, we evaluate theplausibility of a common explanation for the higher likelihood of interracial/ethnic partnershipamong same-sex couplesthat those seeking same-sex partners must widen their search becauseof the smaller pool of available partners. We use data from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. censuses andthe 2005-7 American Community Survey to compare patterns of interracial/ethnic partnershipamong same-sex male cohabiting couples, same-sex female cohabiting couples, different-sexcohabiting couples, and different-sex married couples. We present multiple pieces of evidencethat raise doubts about the availability hypothesis. Most of our measures indicate that in timesand places where the availability of same-sex partners is greater, same-sex couples are morelikely to be interracial/ethnic, a result opposite of what the availability hypothesis would predict.Our findings suggest the plausibility of other explanations for differences in interracial/ethnicmatching between same- and different-sex couples, such as differences in preferences forpartners, differences in the venues in which those seeking same- and different-sex partners meet,and differences in pressure from friends and family to form endogamous unions.

The Housing Act of 1949 established a federally subsidized program that helped cities clear areas of buildings for redevelopment, rehabilitate deteriorating structures, complete comprehensive city plans, and enforce building codes. The program ended in 1974, but not before financing over 2,100 projects and generating great controversy. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the program’s effects on city-level outcomes. The estimated effects are generally positive and economically significant and are not driven by differential changes in cities’ demographic composition. We find no evidence of detrimental effects on residential segregation by race.

Little is known about couples' shared time and how actual time spent together is associated with well-being. In this study, the authors investigated how work and family demands are related to couples' shared time (total and exclusive) and individual well-being (happiness, meaningfulness, and stress) when with one's spouse. They used individual-level data from the 2003-2010 American Time Use Survey (N = 46,883), including the 2010 Well-Being Module. The results indicated that individuals in full-time working dual-earner couples spend similar amounts of time together as individuals in traditional breadwinner-homemaker arrangements on weekdays after accounting for daily work demands. The findings also show that parents share significantly less total and exclusive spousal time together than nonparents, though there is considerable variation among parents by age of the youngest child. Of significance is that individuals experience greater happiness and meaning and less stress during time spent with a spouse opposed to time spent apart.

Health behaviors are a leading cause of illness and death in the United States. Efforts to improve public health require information on the prevalence of health behaviors in populations not only to target programs to areas of most need but also to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention efforts. Telephone surveys, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, are a good way to assess health behaviors in populations. These data provide estimates at the national and state level but often require multiple years of data to provide reliable estimates at the local level. With changes in telephone use (eg, rapid decline in the ownership of landlines), innovative methods to collect data on health behaviors, such as in health care settings or through Internet-based surveys, need to be developed.

Using 2004-2008 data from the American Time Use Survey, we show that sharp differences between the time use of immigrants and natives become noticeable when activities are distinguished by incidence and intensity. We develop a theory of the process of assimilation--what immigrants do with their time--based on the notion that assimilating activities entail fixed costs. The theory predicts that immigrants will be less likely than natives to undertake such activities, but conditional on undertaking them, immigrants will spend more time on them than natives. We identify several activities--purchasing, education and market work--as requiring the most interaction with the native world, and these activities more than others fit the theoretical predictions. Additional tests suggest that the costs of assimilating derive from the costs of learning English and from some immigrants' unfamiliarity with a high-income market economy. A replication using the 1992 Australian Time Use Survey yields remarkably similar results.

In this paper we explore the effects of the subprime mortgage boom from 2001 to 2005 and the subprime mortgage bust from 2005 to 2008 on the probability of homeownership of naturalized immigrant, non-naturalized immigrant and native US citizen households. Consistent with our predictions, we find that from 2001 to 2005 naturalized and non-naturalized immigrant households increased their probability of homeownership relative to natives by 3.8% and 5.3%, respectively. Then from 2005 to 2008 naturalized and non-naturalized immigrant households decreased their probability of homeownership relative to natives by 1.3% and 1.5%, respectively. Additionally, we find that continent of birth and whether the head of household is self-employed are important predictors of homeownership for immigrants.