This paper analyzes the impact of temporary immigration on the prices of non-tradable goods and services. It presents a model of a small open economy that produces two goods (or services), one tradable and one non tradable. In accordance with a common characteristic of temporary work permit schemes we assume that temporary immigrants are conned to work in the non-traded sector. We further assume that they are only imperfect substitutes for permanent immigrants and native low skilled workers and that they send large parts of their revenues to their home country. It is shown that in this setup temporary immigrants have a negative eect on the prices of non-traded goods and services, while the eect of permanent immigrants is ambiguous. We test these predictions empirically using a panel dataset of 14 U.S. cities for the period 2000 − 2006. Our results suggest that low skilled temporary immigrants have a larger and negative impact on the relative price of non-traded goods than permanent immigrants.

Although a sizable fraction of the Puerto Ricanborn population moved to the United States, the island also received large inflows of persons born outside Puerto Rico. Hence Puerto Rico provides an unique setting for examining how labor inflows and outflows coexist and measuring the mirror-image wage impact of these flows. The study yields two findings. First, the skills of the out-migrants differ from those of the in-migrants. Puerto Rico attracts high-skill in-migrants and exports low-skill workers. Second, the two flows have opposing effects on wages: in-migrants lower the wage of competing workers, and out-migrants increase the wage.

This robustness appendix provides a variety of additional results and background material for our paper “Conspicuous Consumption and Race”. The data and code for all results shown in the paper and for the robustness appendix can be found online at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/erik.hurst/research/race_and_consumption_data_page.html. The appendix is broken into six sections. In the first section, we describe and discuss results from the survey that we independently conducted to elicit individual perceptions about what consumption categories are considered “visible” (in the sense described in the main text of our paper). In Section 2, we show a series of robustness results about Black-White consumption differences using the CEX data described in the text. In particular, we explore . . .

Objective To examine the effect of the transition to adulthood on financial and non-financial barriers to care in youth with asthma. Study design With National Health Interview Survey data from 2000 to 2005, we examined delays and unmet needs because of financial and non-financial barriers, evaluating the effect of adolescent (age, 12-17 years; n = 1539) versus young adult age (age, 18-24 years; N = 833), controlling for insurance, usual source of care, and sociodemographic characteristics. We also simulated the effects of providing public insurance to uninsured patients and a usual source of care to patient: without one. Results More young adults than adolescents encountered financial barriers resulting in delays (18.6% versus 8%, P < .05) and unmet needs (26.6% versus 11.4%, P < .05), although delays caused by non-financial barriers were similar (17.3% versus 14.9%, P = not significant). In logistic models young adults were more likely than adolescents to report delays (odds ratio [OR], 1.45; 95% CI, 1.02-2.08) and uninet needs (OR, 1.8; 95% CI, 1.29-2.52) caused by financial barriers. Conclusions Delays and unmet needs for care caused by financial reasons are significantly higher for young adults than they are for adolescents with asthma.

This paper uses the 1960-2000 PUMS to study changes over time in the labor market performance of immigrants in the United States. While data from 1960-1990 show a continuous decline in the earnings of new immigrants, the trend reversed in the 1990s, with newcomers doing as well in 2000, relative to natives, as they had 20 years earlier. This improvement in immigrant performance is not explained by changes in origin-country composition, educational attainment or state of residence. Changes in labor market conditions, including changes in the wage structure which could differentially impact recent arrivals, can account for only a small part of it. The upturn appears to have been caused in part by a shift in immigration policy toward high-skill workers matched with jobs, an increase in the earnings of immigrants from Mexico, and a decline in the earnings of native high school dropouts. The evidence is also consistent with an improvement in immigrant quality within certain origin countries.

Over the past two decades, there have been attempts to identify and understand suburban metropolitan growth patterns and the implications of this growth on both the local and regional economy. Understanding suburban metropolitan growth is important in determining the impacts that this type of growth may have on the local and regional economic status, patterns of land use and transportation, population trends, and income levels. The focus of this research is two-fold. One goal of the research is to determine whether the initial theory of metrotown still holds true. Are suburban growth centers continuing to grow into self-sufficient "mini-cities." Do suburban growth centers continue to evolve into strong, second-tier business districts? Do they share an interdependent relationship with the central city? The second focus of this research is to attempt to identify distinguishing characteristics between local and regional economic activities within suburban growth centers. This research investigates the characteristics between local and regional economic activities within Kenwood, Ohio. Three criteria used to evaluate the Kenwood area include its spatial and physical organization and characteristics, its composition, as well as its local and regional economic activities. The specific aims of the study are to: 1) assess the current status of the Kenwood area as a metrotown; 2) examine and analyze the major differences between local and regional activities in Kenwood, in relation to employment and land use; 3) identify and examine the changes and influences of income, land use, and transportation on the economic growth of the study area as a metrotown; and 4) identify specific factors that influence the location of economic activity within the Kenwood area.

This article investigates whether increasing mandatory educational attainment through compulsory schooling legislation encourages women to delay childbearing. We use variation induced by changes in compulsory schooling laws in both the US and Norway to estimate the effect in two very different institutional environments. We find evidence that increased compulsory schooling does in fact reduce the incidence of teenage childbearing in both the US and Norway, and these estimates are quite robust to various specification checks. These results suggest that legislation aimed at improving educational outcomes may have spillover effects onto the fertility decisions of teenagers.

Great achievements in knowledge are produced by older innovators today than they were a century ago. Nobel Prize winners and great inventors have become especially unproductive at younger ages. Meanwhile, the early life-cycle decline is not o¤set by increased productivity beyond middle age. The early life-cycle dynamics are closely related to Ph.D. age, and I discuss a theory where knowledge accumulation across generations leads innovators to seek more education over time. More generally, the narrowing innovative life cycle reduces, other things equal, aggregate creative output. This productivity drop is particularly acute if innovators'raw ability is greatest when young.

In "Native Internal Migration and the Labor Market Impact of Immigration," George Borjas (2006) identifies a strong negative correlation between immigration and native-born employment in the US using local area data. This relationship is particularly strong at the metropolitan area level, weaker but still significant at the state level, and weakest at the Census region level. In this note, we show that Borjas’s negative correlation arises due to the construction of the dependent and explanatory variables rather than from any true negative association between the employment growth of immigrants and natives. Borjas regresses log native employment, ln(Nt), on the share of foreign-born employment, pt = Mt/(Mt + Nt), across skill-state-year cells. The specification therefore includes native employment in the numerator of the dependent variable and in the denominator of the explanatory variable. This builds a negative correlation into the model that is particularly strong if the variance of Nt relative to Mt is large. To illustrate, we first show that state and city level regressions of the standardized native employment change, (Nt+10−Nt)/(Mt+Nt), on standardized immigration, (Mt+10 −Mt)/(Mt+Nt), always find a positive and mostly significant correlation between the two. Second, we randomly simulate changes in the native and foreign-born workforce with a data generating process that has zero or positive correlation between the shocks ΔMt and ΔNt (i.e., so that immigration is associated with either no change or an increase in native employment). Borjas specifications employing this simulated data estimate large and significantly negative coefficients as long as the variance of ΔNt is larger than the variance of ΔMt, which is true in observed state-level and city-level data.

Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, the authors explore two alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap: occupational sorting, and human capital differences. They find that lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women irrespective of marital status, while gay men earned less than their married heterosexual counterparts but more than their cohabitating heterosexual counterparts. Results of a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition indicate that the relative wage advantages observed for some groups of lesbians and gay men were mainly owing to greater levels of human capital accumulation (particularly education), while occupational sorting had little or no influence. The relative wage penalties that were observed in other cases, however, cannot be attributed either to differences in occupational sorting or to human capital. An analysis employing a DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux decomposition, which allows for variation in the wage gap at different points along the wage distribution, broadly confirms these results.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of educational assortative marriage on the growth in earnings inequality between households in the United States between the period 1975-79 and 2001-05 using data from the March CPS. We decompose inequality between households into a within- and a between-group component. The groups are definedaccording to the educational level of the household head and his/her partner. We also include households with an unpartnered head by allowing the definition of mens andwomens education to include an absent category. Thus, unlike most previous analyses of the effects of educational homogamy on economic inequality, we also take into accounthouseholds headed by an unpartnered person. Our results suggest that changing distributions of male and female education and changing patterns of educational assortativemating have played very little role in explaining why inter-household earnings inequality increased over the period that we consider. Rather, the main causes were increasing gaps between households of different types in their average earnings, and rising inequality within households of each particular type. This is consistent with the well known story of increasing returns to education over time and increasing heterogeneity of returns within each level of education. The results, however, contradict the argument that increasing educational homogamy, of itself, will cause greater inequality between households.

Using the confidential long-form records of the 2000 population census, we study the choices of metropolitan destinations made by the Mexican-born and Indian-born immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1995-2000. Based on the application of a multinomial logit model to the data of each of these two ethnic groups, our main findings are as follows. The destination choice behaviors of both ethnic groups were in general consistent with the major theories of migration. Both groups were subject to (1) the attraction of co-ethnic communities and (2) the positive effects of wage level and total employment growth. With respect to the job increases in different wage deciles, both ethnic groups share the pattern that the less educated were subject to the pull of increase in low-wage jobs, whereas the better educated were subject to the pull of increase in high-wage jobs. With respect to the possibility of competitions against other foreign-born ethnics, both ethnic groups were found to be more prone to selecting destinations where their co-ethnics represented a relatively high proportion of the foreign-born population. The main differences in destination choice behaviors between the two ethnic groups resulted partly from the fact that the relative explanatory powers of our chosen explanatory factors differed substantially between the two ethnic groups. The Mexican-born were more subject to the attractions of (1) larger co-ethnic communities, (2) greater overall employment growth, (3) more job increases in low wage deciles, and (4) greater share of the foreign-born population by co-ethnics. In contrast, the Indian-born were more attracted by (1) higher wage level, and (2) more job increases in high wage deciles.

   “discovered” unemployment and vagrancy during the s, they launched a debate about work and poverty that remained vigorous for decades and in so me ways still resonates in contemporary politics. Who were these people without jobs who wandered from town to town, begging for meals and straining the meager social services of local communities? Were they honest workers cast into poverty by forces outside their control, or had their own character flaws, addictions, and manias driven them . . .

This dissertation contains three empirical papers on important health policy issues. The first paper looks at the effect of changes in levels of Medicare home health care services on the informal care use of disabled, older adults. I estimate two-part models of informal care use, where the key independent variable is a measure of Medicare home health payment restrictiveness. Individuals who lived in states with less Medicare home health care services increased their use of informal care, although this effect is only observed among low-income individuals. The second paper assesses the effects of changes in employment incentives on the supply of informal support from adult children to their disabled, older parents. This study focuses on one specific form of informal support, co-residence with a disabled parent. I compare changes in co-residence patterns between 1990 and 2000 across groups of middle aged women whose co-residence patterns were arguably comparable, and who experienced very different changes in employment incentives. Results from difference-in-difference models provide support to the hypothesis that increasing employment incentives reduces the supply of informal support to disabled parents. The third paper looks at the effect of education on health status. This paper builds on the extensive research literature on this topic by measuring health in terms of the number of Quality-Adjusted Life Years experienced by individuals over an extended period of time. This measure captures overall health status over time, which is arguably a more important measure than point-in-time measures of specific health conditions or longevity alone. I use changes in compulsory schooling laws to identify the causal effect of education on health. Instrumental variables models provide evidence that the health returns to education are both statistically significant and substantial.

Beginning in 1959 the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia were closed for five years in opposition to court-ordered integration. I combine data from numerous administrative sources to examine the effects of the school clos-ings on the educational attainment and economic outcomes of affected Black children. Although exposed students obtained an average of one fewer year of schooling than peers in surrounding counties, they do not exhibit substantially worse material, health, and incarceration outcomes. These findings may result from 1) the provision of substitute educational opportunities for many students and 2) flat returns at levels of educational attainment typical for southern Vir-ginia Blacks during this period.

The first two essays of this dissertation use policy experiments to show that low-skilled newly arriving immigrants help keep the economy in geographic equilibrium by differentially selecting destinations that provide better labor market prospects. The first essay finds that immigrants choose labor markets with smaller welfare-reform created native supply shocks. Theory predicts that an increase in native supply will lower the earnings a new immigrant can expect, and immigrants thus should choose labor markets experiencing smaller supply shocks. Using a linearized version of a discrete choice model, I find that the distribution of immigrants' destinations shifts markedly away from cities with high welfare participation prior to reform toward cities with lower participation. This shift "undoes" nearly all of the difference in labor supply that would have resulted had immigrants not altered their destination choices. The second essay shows that immigrants also respond optimally to the minimum wage. These policy changes have a theoretically ambiguous effect on a job seeker's expected earnings; so I first use native teenagers to determine that a minimum wage increase will lower expected earnings for a new entrant. I then show that immigrants differentially select destination states with smaller increases or a fixed minimum, consistent with the theory. The results are strong and statistically significant even after accounting for several potentially confounding alternatives. As a falsification test, I show that the minimum wage does not affect the destinations chosen by higher-skilled immigrants. The final essay, written with Ben Keys, proposes an explanation for a surprising borrowing phenomenon: nearly one fifth of undergraduate students who are offered interest-free loans turn them down, foregoing a significant government subsidy worth up to $1,500. We discuss how advances behavioral economics can explain students' failure to accept this "free money." We then demonstrate a differential rejection rate based on how students receive their loan funds. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that students who would receive their loan as easy to spend cash are seven percentage points more likely to reject the loan than are similar students living off-campus. We interpret this finding as evidence for the behavioral explanation.

There has been considerable debate about childrens health coverage at the national level. The debate has been stimulated in large part by legislation to reauthorize the State Childrens Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Many states have initiated programs to reduce the numbers of uninsured children. Recently, some states have set a goal of universal coverage for children. Given the significance of this health policy issue, the Center for Mississippi Health Policy has researched the status of health coverage for children in Mississippi and produced a report entitled "Children's Health Coverage in Mississippi." The report provides a detailed overview of the health care coverage for children in Mississippi and reviews trends in coverage. The report additionally focuses on uninsured children in the state and discusses the value of health insurance coverage for children. Strategies used by other states to reduce the number of uninsured children are reviewed and policy options for Mississippi are outlined.

Choices pertaining to education, marriage and migration generally have profound impacts on individuals’ lives. This dissertation focuses on the role of incentives in decisions involving education, interracial marriage and migration. To this end, Chapter 2 initiates a new line of research that investigates the role of self-employed parents on their children’s post-graduation plans and college success. Chapter 2 reveals that self-employed parents affect their offspring’s college success even after accounting for possible ability bias and controlling for various individual characteristics. While Chapter 2 focuses on the role of parental occupation on students’ incentives to succeed in college, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 investigate intricate relationships among education, interracial marriage, the anti-miscegenation laws, and migration in the U.S. Chapter 3 introduces a study that links previous literatures on the migration of blacks in the U.S. during the Great Migration with anti-miscegenation laws and interracial marriage. Chapter 3 concludes that anti-miscegenation laws in individuals’ states of birth affected the sorting of inter- and intraracially married . . .