This paper provides an overview of the mushrooming economics literature on how community attributes influence the level of civic engagement. Since 1997, at least fifteeen empirical papers have investigated the consequences of heterogeneity for social capital. Social capital has been measured using indicators of group participation such as volunteer activity, organizational membership and activity, entertaining and visiting friends and relatives, and voting and indicators of the strength of network ties such as trust. These papers cover different nations, different social capital measures, and even different centuries. But a common theme emerges across these fifteen studies. More homogeneous communities foster greater levels of social capital production. We provide an overview of this literature and then focus on synthesizing our past work on volunteering and membership with new findings on trust and voting.

In this paper I explore the flexibility of the work week in the United States, using the FIFA Soccer World Cup as a natural experiment. My empirical strategy exploits the exogenous variation that arises due to which country hosts the World Cup, as this will determine the time games are broadcast across different time zones in the United States. The hour of the day when games are broadcast differentially affects hours of work across different time zones. Further, the calendar timing of the World Cup allows me to compare labor market outcomes in June/July for a worker in World Cup year t, with the outcomes in June/July for a worker in non-World Cup years t + 1, t + 2 and t + 3. My results highlight the importance of the worker's pay frequency in their work week flexibility, as all differences in hours of work due to the World Cup are concentrated among salary paid workers, while hourly paid workers do not change their market hours during the World Cup. Also, my results show that after controlling for observable demographic characteristics as well as year and month fixed effects, a worker reduces on average his weekly number of hours of work during the World Cup by statistically significant estimates that range from 9 weekly minutes to 28 weekly minutes, depending on specification choice and time of the day during which World Cup games are broadcast live in the U.S.

This paper investigates the effect of occupational licensing regulation on the representation of minority workers in a range of skilled and semiskilled occupations. We take advantage of a quasi experiment afforded by the introduction of state-level licensing regulation during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries to identify the effects of licensing on female and black workers. We find that licensing laws seldom harmed minority workers. In fact, licensing often helped minorities, particularly in occupations for which information about worker quality was difficult to ascertain.

We analyze the achievement of 93 percent of the New York City charter school students who wereenrolled in test-taking grades (grades 3 through 12) in 2000-01 through 2007-08. More than 94percent of charter school applicants participate in admissions lotteries. The lotteries are crucial forremedying the self-selection problem because charter school applicants are substantially morelikely to be black and poor than students in the traditional public schools. Using the lotteries toform an intention-to-treat variable, we instrument for actual enrollment and compute the charterschools' average treatment-on-the-treated effects on achievement. These are 0.09 standarddeviations per year of treatment in math and 0.06 standard deviations per year of treatment inreading. These results are robust, as shown by specification tests for various issues: non-matching,attrition, retention-in-grade, returning to the traditional public schools, and so on. The results donot differ statistically significantly by the race/ethnicity of the student, the gender of the student,the number of years we observe the student, or the lotteried-in percentage of the school. Weestimate associations (not causal relationships) between charter schools' policies and their effectson achievement. Policies with fairly consistent positive associations with achievement include along school year; a greater number of minutes devoted to English during each school day; a smallrewards/small penalties disciplinary policy; teacher pay based somewhat on performance or duties,as opposed to a traditional pay scale based strictly on seniority and credentials; and a missionstatement that emphasizes academic performance, as opposed to other goals.

Recent evidence makes clear that states public high school graduation ratesare well measured using information from the Common Core of Data(CCD). This article investigates the substantive consequences for the resultsof empirical analyses of using different CCD-based measures of states publichigh school graduation rates. The authors show that substantive conclusionsabout the levels, correlates, and predictors of states public highschool graduation rates are dependent on how those rates are measuredusing the CCD data. Warrens (2005) estimated completion rate is the mostconceptually and technically sound CCD-based measure, and that measureis improved in this study. The public high school graduation rate for theclass of 2004 was about 76 percent, although that rate varied considerablyby race/ethnicity and across states.

The significance of location and its diverse economic impacts is increasingly recognised and studied in the discipline of economics. Geo-ICT is used mostly in the subdiscipline of spatial economics, where GIS software is used in combination with existing spatially-explicit theories. The increasing availability of spatial data, analytical methods and computer processing power has offered researchers ways of exploring spatially-related phenomena in previously impenetrable fields like the dynamics behind the use of space. This trend will continue in future since dynamic location technologies are currently being adopted throughout society, offering new opportunities for collecting near real-time location data on objects and people. This chapter describes the discipline of economics and focuses on the use of Geo-ICT, in the past, present and near future, in the field of spatial economics.

A common perception about immigrant assimilation is that association with nativesnecessarily speeds the process by which immigrants become indistinguishable from natives.Using 2000 Census data, this paper casts doubt on this presumption by examining the effectof an immigrants marriage to a native, a measure of social integration, on dropout rates ofchildren from these marriages. Although second-generation immigrants with one nativeparent generally have lower dropout rates than those with two foreign-born parents, therelationship reverses when steps are taken to control for observable and unobservablebackground characteristics. That is, immigrants that marry natives have children that aremore likely to dropout of high school than immigrants that marry other immigrants. Moreover,gender differences in the effect of marriage to a native disappear in specifications whichcontrol for the endogeneity of the marriage decision.

Renaud Le Goix est gographe, matre de confrences l'universit Paris 1 et membre de l'UMR Gographie-cits 8504. IL a codirig avec Thrse Saint-Julien La mtropole parisienne : centralits, ingalits, proximits (Belin, 2007) et sign Villes et Mondialisation (Ellipses, 2005). Cyrille Suss est cartographe indpendant. Il collabore avec divers diteurs et a cr pour Autrement les cartes de l'Atlas gopolitique de la Russie (2007) et de l'Atlas des dveloppements durables (2008). Julien Daniel a ralis le reportage photographique.

A common perception about immigrant assimilation is that association with natives necessarily speeds the process by which immigrants become indistinguishable from natives. Using 2000 Census data, this paper casts doubt on this presumption by examining the effect of an immigrant's marriage to a native, a measure of social integration, on dropout rates of children from these marriages. Although second-generation immigrants with one native parent generally have lower dropout rates than those with two foreign-born parents, the relationship reverses when steps are taken to control for observable and unobservable background characteristics. That is, immigrants that marry natives have children that are more likely to drop out of high school than immigrants that marry other immigrants. Moreover, gender differences in the effect of marriage to a native disappear in specifications which control for the endogeneity of the marriage decision.

The role that source country characteristics has in determining the labor market performance of immigrants has long been explored by economists. For example, Borjas J. Borjas 1987 models the migration decision as determined by expected di_erence in the immigrant's position in the earnings distribution in the host and source countries. Deborah A. Cobb-Clark 1993 extends Bor- jas' model to immigrant women. Similarly, other studies explore how culture or traditional gender roles in the source country persist across borders and inuence the labor market outcomes of immigrant women in the U.S. For ex-ample, Heather Antecol 2001, 2000 and Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn, and Kerry L. Papps 2008 _nd a positive relationship between source country characteristics and the labor market outcomes of immigrant women in the U.S. However, absent from the existing literature is an examination of how changes over time in a source country's characteristics are associated with changes in the labor market outcomes of immigrants from that source country.

This study examined the racial identification of biracial Asian children by their parents, in a sample (N=9,513) drawn from 2000 Public Use Microdata Series Census data (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series 2009). I used competing theories of Asian assimilation to examine how characteristics of the child, the Asian parent, the non-Asian parent, and the local Asian community influenced the likelihood of a child?s being identified as Asian, non-Asian, or biracial. Findings showed that child?s, both parents?, and community characteristics significantly influenced the child?s racial classification. While the effects of greater assimilation significantly increased the likelihood of an Asian classification for third-generation children, in contrast, it decreased the likelihood of an Asian identification for first- and second-generation children. Findings showed that children with a black parent were less likely than children with a white parent to be identified as Asian instead of non-Asian. However, inconsistent with past findings, children with a Hispanic parent were more likely than those with a white parent to be identified as Asian rather than non-Asian. Exploratory analyses concerning a biracial classification indicate significant relationships with factors previously found to increase the likelihood of an Asian identification, including the effects of greater Asian assimilation and size of the local Asian community. Moreover, the relationship between parent?s and child?s gender on the child?s racial classification may be more complicated than previously theorized, as I found evidence of gender-matching which meant that boys were more likely to be identified like their fathers, and girls more like their mothers.

This paper estimates the multi-dimensional human capital endowments of immigrants by characterizing their occupational decisions. This approach allows forestimation of physical skill and cognitive ability endowments, which are difficult to measure directly. Estimation implies that immigrants as a whole are abundant in cognitive ability and scarce in experience/training and communication skills. Counterfactual estimates of the wage impacts of immigration are skewed: the largest gain from preventing immigration is 3.2% higher wages, but the largest loss is 0.3% lower wages. Crowding of immigrants into select occupations plays a minor role in explaining these impacts; occupations' skill attributes explain the bulk.

Using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of the United States, this study examined ethnic disparities in labor force participation among Asian female immigrants and predictors of labor force participation among different ethnic subgroups. Among the study sample, Filipino immigrants showed the highest rates of labor force participation, followed by Chinese immigrants. The results of logistic regression models indicated that having a higher level of education was positively related to labor force participation, while having a child under age 5 and having other family income sources were negatively associated with labor force participation. Among immigration-related factors, having US citizenship, a longer length of residence in the United States, and a better English proficiency level were positively related to labor force participation among Asian female immigrants. The different predictors of labor force participation by ethnic subgroups were identified.

The share of metropolitan residents living in the central city has declined continuouslysince 1950. We show that, if not for a series of demographic factors notably renewedimmigration, a falling share of households with children and a reduction in the number ofveterans, many of whom have access to housing benefits cities would have contracted evenfurther. We provide causal estimates of the relationship between the presence of children orveteran status and living in the central city, relying variously on the occurrence of twins orcomparisons between birth cohorts coming of age during and after the mass mobilization forWorld War II. We conclude that demographic trends were only strong enough to stanch the flowof population from cities, not to generate an urban revival.

This paper tests the strength and persistence of cultural influences on entrepreneurshipover the best part of a century. Comparison of marginal self-employment propensities ofUS immigrant groups in 1910 and 2000 suggests a number of stable customary stimuli,deduced from national origins. In accordance with the cultural critique, the Englishwere persistently prone to less entrepreneurship than other US immigrant groups, oncecontrols for entrepreneurship influences are included. The Dutch were consistently aboutaveragely entrepreneurial, not as precocious as might be expected if the predominantProtestant religion encouraged entrepreneurship. Conversely Webers identification ofnineteenth century Catholic culture as inimical to economic development is not born outin the twentieth century by the sustained entrepreneurship of Cubans and Italians in theUnited States. The strongest entrepreneurial cultures were exhibited by those originatingfrom the Middle East, Greece and Turkey, though some historical interpretation isnecessary to establish who these people were. The inference from these patterns is thatentrepreneurial culture must be of minor significance for economic developmentcompared with institutional influences.

Are U.S. immigrants’ English proficiency and social outcomes the result of their cultural preferences, or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 Census microdata, we relate immigrants’ marriage, fertility and residential location variables to their age at arrival in the U.S., and in particular whether that age fell within the “critical period” of language acquisition. We interpret the differences between younger and older arrivers as effects of English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for English-language skills. Two-stage-least-squares estimates suggest that English proficiency increases the likelihood of divorce and intermarriage. It decreases fertility and, for some groups, ethnic enclave residence.