I use an instrumental-variables identification strategy and historical data from the United States to estimate the long-term economic impact of in utero and postnatal exposure to malaria. My research design matches adults in the 1960 Decennial Census to the malaria death rate in their respective state and year of birth. To address potential omitted variables bias and measurement-error bias, I use variation in "malaria-ideal" temperatures to instrument for malaria exposure. My estimates indicate that in utero and postnatal exposure to malaria led to considerably lower levels of educational attainment and higher rates of poverty later in life. Abstract I use an instrumental-variables identification strategy and historical data from the United States to estimate the long-term economic impact of in utero and postnatal exposure to malaria. My research design matches adults in the 1960 Decennial Census to the malaria death rate in their respective state and year of birth. To address potential omitted-variables bias and measurement-error bias, I use variation in "malaria-ideal" temperatures to instrument for malaria exposure. My estimates indicate that in utero and postnatal exposure to malaria led to considerably lower levels of educational attainment and higher rates of poverty later in life.

A restrictive population policy led to almost doubling the number of newborns from one year to another in Romania in the 1960s. Twenty years later, this large generation (of women) enters a marriage market with few eligible older mates, in a society where marriage is a must. In this article, I analyze this social experiment within the broader frame of the marriage squeeze/two sex models. Using various data from censuses and surveys, I argue that the marriage market is flexible even when is confronted with disproportionately large cohorts. If the social pressure toward marriage is strong, the marriage rates do not necessarily fall, but the mating age patterns change.

In this paper I estimate the relationship between school quality and mortality. Although manystudies have linked the quantity of education to health outcomes, the effect of school quality onhealth has yet to be examined. I construct synthetic birth cohorts and relate the quality ofeducation they attained to their mortality rates. I find that there is a statistically significantrelationship between the mortality-schooling gradients, which depict the return to a year ofschooling, and the length of school term and relative teacher wage. For instance, increasing therelative teacher wage by one standard deviation results in about 1.9 less deaths per 1,000 peopleper extra year of education. My results suggest that one way to improve the health of thepopulation is to improve school quality.

The demand for low-wage agricultural workers has been vital to the history of Mexican migration to the United States and continues to be an important factor in contemporary immigration processes. Mexican-born farmworkers, similar to immigrants in other industries, are increasingly bypassing traditional gateway cities and states and settling in new destinations. This research focuses on changes in the geographic distribution of Mexican-born farmworkers over time, earnings inequalities among Mexican-born farmworkers living in traditional agricultural settlement states (California and Texas) and those living in new agricultural destination states, and the structural changes in the agriculture industry that are increasing the demand for hired farm workers. Findings suggest that there has been a dramatic shift in the geographic distribution of this population since 1980, as the proportion of Mexican-born farmworkers living outside of traditional settlement areas has increased. Also, in the 1980s, Mexican-born farmworkers living in traditional settlement states had higher earnings than those residing elsewhere, but that since 1990 earnings have been greater for farmworkers living in new destination states. Through decomposition analysis, this reversal of earnings inequalities is found to be more attributable to changes in the structure of earnings less to changes in the population composition. Variation in the relationship between agricultural restructuring and the demand for hired labor across traditional settlement states and new destination states helps explain these patterns.

The healthcare labor market has experienced some significant changes in the last half century, including the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the emergence of managed care in the 1980s, and the worldwide mobility of labor encouraged by globalization. Currently, more than 25% of physicians working in the U.S. are foreign-born. The existing body of literature related to the impact of immigration on local wages has to date found conflicting results. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of immigration of foreign physicians on local physician wages. This study employs physician survey data from the AMA Physician Masterfile for the years 1997 through 2007 combined with wage data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and data from other government sources. Several econometric models are employed to analyze the wage impacts of immigration, including ordinary least squares, fixed effects, two-stage least squares and a first-difference approach to control for endogenous location choice. The results of this study provide evidence that in the short-run, the impacts of immigration of physicians on area wages is small but positive. In the long run, however, wages adjust and the impact becomes negative and statistically significant, although the magnitude of the impact of a one percentage point increase in the share of immigrant physicians in an area is less than 0.2%. The negative wage effects of immigration tend to be larger for foreign-born physicians educated in the U.S. compared with foreign-born international medical graduates. The study also finds evidence that the negative effects of immigration tend to be offset by outflows . . .

During the 19th century, the US birthrate fell by half. While previous economic literature has emphasized demand-side explanations for this declinethat rising land prices and literacy caused a decrease in demand for childrenhistorians and others haveemphasized changes in the supply of technologies to control fertility, including abortion and birth control. In this paper I exploit the introduction during the 19th century of statelaws governing American womens access to abortion to measure the effect of changes in the supply of fertility technologies on the number of children born. I estimate an increasein the birthrate of 3 to 11% when abortion is restricted, which lies within the ranges of estimates found for the effect of fertility control supply restrictions on birthrates today.The importance of legal abortion in reducing 19th-century birthrates demonstrates helps to account for a previously unexplained portion of the demographic transition. This paper posits that there has long been a demand, often unmet, for fertility control that should beconsidered in future demographic research as well as in policy formulation.

Economists with a few exceptions have automatically assumed that the important measure of well-being is income. In contrast, economic historians have broadened the measure of well-being with particular interest in mortality, morbidity, nutrition, education and leisure. When one takes this broader view of the standard of living, there appears to be a strong trend toward more equality in the distribution of well-being since the industrial revolution. Gini coefficients calculated for the distributions of lifespan and educational attainment have declined dramatically since the mid-nineteenth century for the United States. Mortality and educational differentials have also declined. Inequality of leisure time and consumption, though not as consistently measured, also show trends toward equality over the twentieth century. These trends toward equality in well-being as measured by indicators other than income and wealth seem to be generated by provision of public goods, natural boundaries to lifespan, educational attainment and leisure, and by the growth in mean per capita income. The divergent trends in the distributions of income and the other measures of well-being caution against reliance on the distribution of income to interpret trends in inequality.

Camilo Torres Restrepo en su tesis de grado para obtener la licenciatura en Sociología en la Universidad de Lovaina analizaba, hace 50 años, algunos aspectos del proceso de proletarización en Bogotá hacia mediados del siglo pasado1 . Definía la proletarización “como el proceso por el cual una gran proporción de asalariados pierden todo otro medio de subsistencia distinto de su propia fuerza de trabajo” y lo ligaba con “una estructura socioeconómica, de división del trabajo, de concentración capitalista y de industrialización” (Torres, 1987 [1958]: 24). En el estudio partía de que en los países “en desarrollo” la proletarización, todavía en su fase inicial, avanzaba más rápidamente que en los países desarrollados. Su análisis, basado en una precaria información estadística, evidenciaba las grandes desigualdades de la ciudad entre sectores sociales caracterizados como clases.

Economic theory assumes that taxpayers use their true marginal tax rate (MTR) to guide their economic decisions. However, due to complexity of the tax system, taxpayers may incorrectly perceive their MTR, with implications for incentives. We first develop an updating model that formalizes this conjecture. It predicts that an unexpected increase in the previous year's tax liability pushes up the perception of the MTR in the current year, even though the MTR is not in fact changing. We then examine whether household labor income responds to predictable (but not necessarily predicted) lump-sum variation in the previous year's tax liability due to loss of eligibility for the Child Tax Credit when the eligible child turns 17. Using an identification strategy based on an eligibility discontinuity, we find that losing the credit reduces, ceteris paribus, parental labor income in the year following the loss of the credit. This result is robust to a variety of tests and different data sources. Because it cannot be explained by an income effect or credit constraints, such a finding is inconsistent with the taxpayers being fully rational and fully informed. We interpret it as being driven by a substitution effect on labor supply due to imperfect ex-post understanding of the change in the tax schedule.

This study will describe immigration dynamics in HUDs Renewal Community, Empowerment Zone, and Enterprise Community (RC/EZ/EC) programs and identify places where immigrant firms and targeted services contributed to revitalization. Is there a policy treatment effect of the EZECs compared to the rest of the county on entrepreneurship controlling for the jobs housing imbalance and longitudinal immigration trends? This study uses Heckmans Differences in Differences approach to answer these questions with data from the National Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB), Integrated Public User Microdata (IPUMS) and other census products. Execs experienced a 4% increase in the foreign born holding other variables constant. The rate of native born entrepreneurs in wage credit EZs increased 14 to 24% from 1990 to 2000 holding other variables constant (N=134). There is no signi?cant change in the rates of foreign born entrepreneurship in any EZ from 1990 to 2000 after controlling for other variables. However, self employed foreign born who have an incorporated business have substantially lower participation as a proportion of the labor force in EZECs with the wage credit. The year effect is a 6% increase for all entrepreneurs holding other variables constant. In regards to the impact of the EZEC on the jobs housing imbalance, there was a 6 to 17% reduction in target areas compared to the rest of the county holding other variables constant (N=162). Analysis of interviews with community development professionals and annual reports illustrate cases where the immigrant and minority labor force is locally incorporated into entrepreneurship or mainstream employment through workforce development systems. Artists, immigrants and native born people returning to their old neighborhood all play a role in community renewal. Future urban policy needs to acknowledge the role of immigration in local economies through culturally competent workforce development, language training and mentoring new entrepreneurs.

In contrast to the three major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, urban transport in Japanese regional cities has been on the decline. In addition to the rise in automobile usage, the population of city centres is decreasing and that of suburbs is increasing. With these problems in mind, we examine the transport situation in Japanese regional cities, and propose a desirable urban transport policy for these cities. By using census micro-statistics, we provide a summary of the transport situation in regional cities, and compare these situations to the major metropolitan areas in the United States. We then reveal the lack of policy measures required to tackle these problems, and discuss some prospects for future urban transport policy in Japanese regional cities.

The proper analysis of data is predicated on the existence of a data set containing valid responses. There are many sound techniques that should be employed to minimize data errors, and to cleanse data sets. The purpose of this article is to provide instructors and their students with an overview of the mechanics of data capture; the metadata framework; outlier detection and treatment; and contemporary solutions for missing data.

We study the effects of immigration on the diversity of consumption choices. Data from California in the 1990s indicate that immigration is associated with fewer stand-alone retail stores, and a greater number of large and in particular big-box retailers evidence that likely contradicts a diversity-enhancing effect of immigration. In contrast, focusing on the restaurant sector for which we can better identify the types of products consumed by customers, we find that immigration is associated with increased ethnic diversity of restaurants. This latter effect appears to come in part from the comparative advantage of immigrants in the production of ethnic goods.

This paper examines the overeducation/undereducation and required (OUR) returns to education hypothesis among Caribbean immigrants in the labour market of the United States of America using the IPUMS 5% sample.140 The results show that Caribbean immigrants in the United States receive lower returns than the native born despite being in the United States for some time. The methodology employed is somewhat different to the traditional approach, as a hierarchical model is used to account for the nesting of individuals within occupation, or for the presence of fixed effects due to differences in occupation. The results suggest that overeducation, though common to both the native born and to Caribbean immigrants, is rewarded less among immigrants and represents an underutilization of resources. It was also observed that Caribbean immigrants have higher levels of undereducation relative to the native born. The paper suggests ways in which immigration policies could be crafted to improve the return to education of immigrants who bring considerable pre-immigration experience to the labour market, to create win-win situations for both sending and receiving countries. With respect to sending countries, it is argued that improved returns to overeducation add to immigrant wealth which allows those who wish to return to the Caribbean, often with improved skills and expertise, to do so much earlier. Secondly, this translates to a possible increased flow of remittances and other resources to the Caribbean. For receiving countries, improved returns to immigrant overeducation reduce the misallocation of resources at the level of the labour market.

Abstract: Konzept einer intermediren Datenstruktur (IDS) zur Integrationnational unterschiedlicher Datenbanken. In recent years, studies of historicalpopulations have shifted from tracing large-scale processes to analyzing longitudinalmicro data in the form of life histories. This approach expands thescope of social history by integrating data on a range of life course events. Thecomplexity of life-course analysis, however, has limited most researchers toworking with one specific database. We discuss methodological problemsraised by longitudinal historical data and the challenge of converting life historiesinto rectangular datasets compatible with statistical analysis systems. Thelogical next step is comparing life courses across local and national databases,and we propose a strategy for sharing historical longitudinal data based on anintermediate data structure (IDS) that can be adopted by all databases. We describethe benefits of the IDS approach and activities that will advance thegoals of simplifying and promoting research with longitudinal historical data.

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the difference betweenthe wage of college graduates and high school graduates over the past 30 years. I show that from1980 to 2000, college graduates have experienced relatively larger increases in cost of living, becausethey have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a high cost ofhousing. When I deflate nominal wages using a new CPI that allows for changes in the cost ofhousing to vary across metropolitan areas, I find that the difference between the wage of collegegraduates and high school graduates is lower in real terms than in nominal terms and has grownless. At least 22% of the documented increase in college premium is accounted for by differencesin the cost of living. The implications of this finding for changes in well-being inequality dependon why college graduates sort into expensive cities. Using a simple general equilibrium model ofthe labor and housing markets, I consider two alternative explanations. First, it is possible thatthe relative supply of college graduates increases in expensive cities because college graduates areincreasingly attracted by amenities located in those cities. In this case, the higher cost of housingreflects consumption of desirable local amenities, and there may still be a significant increase inwell-being inequality even if the increase in real wage inequality is limited. Alternatively, it ispossible that the relative demand for college graduates increases in expensive cities due to shiftsin the relative productivity of skilled labor. In this case, the relative increase in skilled workersstandard of living is offset by the higher cost of living. The evidence indicates that changes in thegeographical location of different skill groups are mostly driven by changes in their relative demand.I conclude that the increase in well-being disparities between 1980 and 2000 is smaller than theincrease in nominal wage disparities that has been the focus of the previous literature.