México es uno de los países con más ciudadanos viviendo en el extranjero, la mayoría de los cuales residen en Estados Unidos. De acuerdo con la Encuesta de Comunidad Americana 2005 (American Community Survey, o ACS) de la Oficina del Censo de los Estados Unidos (U.S. Census Bureau), se estima que de la población total de 288 398 819 personas en ese país, 10 993 851 nacieron en México.1 Esta cifra equivale a: 1) 10.7% de la población de México en ese mismo año; 2) 3.8% de la población de Estados Unidos; y 3) 30.6% del total de residentes en Estados Unidos que nacieron en otro país. México es el país del cual proviene el mayor número de residentes en Estados Unidos nacidos en el extranjero. Le siguen muy distantes en segundo, tercero y cuarto lugares: Filipinas, con 1 594 805 personas (4.5%), India con 1 410 731 (3.9%) y China, con 1 202 923 (3.4 por ciento). Durante años, esta emigración ha sido considerada . . .

Forests provide non-market goods and services that people are implicitly willing to pay for through hedonic housing and labor markets. But it is unclear if compensating differentials arise in these markets at the regional level. This empirical question is addressed in a study of Arizona and New Mexico. Hedonic regressions of housing prices and wages using census and geographic data show that forest area carries an implicit price of between $27 and $36 per square mile annually. Compensating differentials at the regional level suggest that care must be taken when applying the travel cost method to value regionally delineated characteristics.

Identifying the effects of political endorsements has historically been difficult. Before the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. We assess the endorsements impact using subscriptions to O! The Oprah Magazine and the sales of books Winfrey has recommended as measures of her influence. We find it had a positive effect on the votes and financial contributions Obama received, and on voter participation. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and previous elections, nor with underlyingpolitical preferences. Our results suggest Winfrey's endorsement was responsible for approximately 1,000,000 additional votes for Obama.

A lifecourse perspective is key for understanding and interpreting racial and ethnic patterns in neuropsychological test performance. In this article, we discuss contextual factors that shape the environmental conditions encountered by racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, in particular African-Americans. These conditions include geographic segregation at the level of regions, metropolitan areas, and neighborhoods; intra- and inter-national migration patterns; socioeconomic position, including financial resources, and occupational and educational opportunities; discrimination; and group resources. Each of these exposures sets in course a cascade of individual mediators that ultimately manifest in neuropsychological outcomes. The physiological and behavioral consequences of these pathways likely accumulate across the lifecourse. We focus on cognitive aging, although the processes discussed here begin in infancy and likely influence cognitive outcomes throughout life from childhood into old age. A lifecourse framework can help inform clinical encounters, neuropsychological research, and surveillance regarding the population prevalence of cognitive impairments.

Using the 5% IPUMS version of the 2000 Census, this paper finds that, compared to another immigrant who has a job that requires less human-interaction on a daily basis, an immigrant worker who possesses knowledge in speaking a non-English language and who works in a human-interaction-intensive occupation would enjoy an average wage benefit of 4.28%. Also, for those who work at a job that values language usage and cultural familiarity, immigrants from the same country of origin are perceived as substitutes, while those from another country would be complements, a finding that is in accordance with the standard labor supply theory, holding demand constant. Moreover, a one standard deviation increase in bilateral trade volume between the United States and the immigrant's country of origin is predicted to enhance the immigrant's returns to working in the Wholesale Trade industry by 3.36% on average, a pattern that is very different for immigrants who came from a country that uses English as an official language.

Harlem is an iconic Ghetto. The original settlers in Harlem, before 1910, were often middle class, including many notable African Americans. In the 1920s, an efflorescence of culture known as the Harlem Renaissance occurred, and the Apollo Theatre and the Savoy Ball Room were founded. As the “great migration” from the U.S. South continued, and the size of the black population expanded, an area of concentrated poverty developed. Kenneth Clark's (1965) edited volume entitled Dark Ghetto certainly was influenced by Harlem. Clark taught for years at City College, which is in the midst of Harlem. Clark's studies of the influence of segregation on school children were recited in the famous footnote 11 to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that ruled that segregation was illegal, at least with respect to schools. From the 1950s until recently, the involuntary segregation of housing and schools has been seen by most sociologists and other social scientists as an unrelenting negative. There is, of course, another side to this view of segregation, which argues that segregation of African Americans in and of itself is not necessarily pernicious, and since African Americans are discriminated against and stigmatized by many whites and other nonblacks, it is better for them to develop on their own in their own communities. Harlem was and is still seen by many non‐African Americans as a dangerous place, which is unsafe to travel in even during the day. More recently, many have noted that Harlem, along with most other neighborhoods . . .

This research explores how the typical interstate migrant elderly and non-elderly haschanged relative to his/her non-migrating counterpart since 1970. In addition tosocioeconomic status, we focus on the role of two additional characteristics, disabilityand veteran status, which past research has shown are linked with differing motives forelderly migration (assistance moves and amenity moves, respectively). Using data fromthe 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), ourdescriptive and multivariate analyses consistently show that disability status has grown inimportance to elderly migration decisions while veteran and socioeconomic status havedeclined. Furthermore, these changes are unique to the elderly; non-elderly migrationdisplays exactly opposite trends. The growing role of disability in elderly migration isgeographically universal and extends to both return (a proxy for assistance-relatedmigration) and non-return migration. Our results strongly suggest that assistance isgrowing as a motive for elderly interstate migration, which has implications for the risinghealth care costs facing states and, more generally, the gray boon versus gray burdendebate over the consequences of elderly migration.

Growth of technological variety offers more scope for the division of labor. And when a division of labor requires some specific training, the technological specificity of human capital grows, and, with it, probably the firm specificity of that capital grows. We build a simple model that captures this observation. The model implies that a rising specialization of human and physical capital raises the rents in the average match between a firm and its human and physical capital. We document that in the last 40 years the firms share of those rents has also grown, and we use the model to explain why this shift may have taken place.

This paper begins with the observation that estimates of the impact of cityeducational composition on wages, often interpreted as human capital externalities, are notstable over time. Using U.S. Census data, I nd large, positive spill-overs from collegeeducation in the 1980s, as documented by Moretti (2004). In contrast, in the 1990s, thesupply of skilled workers negatively impacts the wages of low-skill workers. This nding issurprising both in magnitude and direction and, I argue, is not consistent with standardmodels of technological human capital externalities. In order to explain this result, I turnto Acemoglu's (1999) model of endogenous job composition. In this model, the observedpattern of education spill-overs can be rationalized by a structural change in the labourmarket driven either by an increase of in the supply of skilled workers and/or technicalchange. This model also has a rich set of testable implications that I take to the data inthe empirical portion of this paper and nd considerable support for them in a numberof dimensions. Consistent with the notion that there has been a structural change in thelabour market, increases in the supply of skilled labour in the 1990s induce a change in thecomposition of jobs, increase inequality, unemployment, the return to education, and thewages of high-skill workers and harm low-skill workers.

In recent decades, rapid growth of the U.S. Hispanic population has raised concerns about immigrant adaptation, including fertility. Empirical research suggests that Hispanics, especially Mexicans, might not be following the historical European pattern of rapid intergenerational fertility decline (and convergence toward native levels). If confirmed, continued high Hispanic fertility could indicate a broader lack of assimilation into mainstream American society. In this paper, we reexamine the issue of Hispanic and Mexican fertility using an approach that combines biological and immigrant generations to more closely approximate a comparison of immigrant women with those of their daughters’ and granddaughters’ generation. Contrary to cross-sectional results, our new analyses show that Hispanic and Mexican fertility is converging with that of whites, and that it is similarly responsive to period conditions and to women’s level of education. In addition, we employ a mathematical simulation to illustrate the conditions under which cross-sectional analyses can produce misleading results. Finally, we discuss the import of the fertility convergence we document for debates about immigrant assimilation.

This paper considers nonparametric identification and estimation of a generalized Roy model that includes a non-pecuniary component of utility associated with each choice alternative. Previous work has found that, without parametric restrictions or the availability of covariates, all of the useful content of a cross-sectional dataset is absorbed in a restrictive specification of Roy sorting behavior that imposes independence on wage draws. While this is true, we demonstrate that it is also possible to identify (under relatively innocuous assumptions and without the use of covariates) a common non-pecuniary component of utility associated with each choice alternative. We develop nonparametric estimators corresponding to two alternative assumptions under which we prove identification, derive asymptotic properties, and illustrate small sample properties with a series of Monte Carlo experiments. We demonstrate the usefulness of one of these estimators with an empirical application. Micro data from the 2000 Census are used to calculate the returns to a college education. If high-school and college graduates face different costs of migration, this would be reflected in different degrees of Roy-sorting-induced bias in their observed wage distributions. Correcting for this bias, the observed returns to a college degree are cut in half.

Estimating the causal effect of a first child on female labor supply is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. This paper addresses this problem by focusing on a sample of women from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) who sought help to become pregnant. After a certain period, only some of these women gave birth. Results using this strategy show that having a first child younger than one year old reduces female employment by 26 percentage points. These estimates are close to OLS estimates from census data and to those from OLS and fixed-effects models on NSFG data.

We investigate the effect of speaking Spanish at home as a child on completed schooling and aptitude test scores using data on Hispanics who grew up in the U.S. from the NLSY79. We model the accumulation of traditional human capital and English fluency, leading to the joint determination of schooling and test scores. We find that speaking Spanish at home reduces test scores but has no significant effect on completed schooling. The reduction in test scores is more dramatic the higher the education of the parents and when the choice of home language is endogenous.

This paper examines the determinants of the initial location choices of immigrants who enter the U.S. with different kinds of visas (green cards). Conditional logit models with the 48 contiguous U.S. states as the choice set are estimated using population data on immigrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1971 and 2000 matched to data on state characteristics from the Integrated Public Use Microsamples of the U.S. Census. As in previous research, it is estimated that immigrants have a higher probability of moving to states where individuals from their region of birth are a larger share of the state population, with relatives of legal permanent residents responding most to this factor. In addition, it is estimated that immigrants in all admission categories respond to labor market conditions when choosing where to live, but that these effects are the largest for male employment-based immigrants and, surprisingly, refugees. These relationships are relatively stable across models that include state fixed effects as well as those that allow the coefficients to vary across the four decades available in the data.

Does attracting or losing jobs in high paying sectors have important spill-over e ffects on wages in other sectors? The answer to this question is central to a proper assessment of many trade and industrial policies. In this paper, we exploit a search and matching model of the labor market to clarify how this question can be properly posed and how it can be empirically explored. In our empirical implementation, we use U.S. Census data over the years 1970 to 2000 to quantify the relationship between changes in industrial composition and changes in industry-specifi c city-level wages. Our findings are that sectoral level wages act as strategic complements in a manner consistent with bargaining theory, and that the spill-over (i.e., general equilibrium) eff ects associated with changes in the fraction of jobs in high paying sectors are very substantial and persistent. Our point estimates indicate that the total effect on average wages of a change in industrial composition that favors high paying sectors is about 3.5 times that obtained from a commonly used composition-adjustment approach which neglects general equilibrium effects. We interpret our results as highlighting the relevance of search and matching models for understanding wage determination in a decentralized economy, and we argue that our results provide considerable support to the populist view that changes in industrial composition is very important for understanding labor market outcomes.

Having a female first-born child significantly increases the probability that a woman's first marriage breaks up. Using this exogenous variation, recent work finds that divorce has little effect on women's mean household income. We further investigate the effect of divorce using Quantile Treatment Effect methodology and find that it increases women's odds of having very high or very low income. In other words, while some women successfully compensate for lost spousal earnings through child support, welfare, combining households, and increasing labor supply, others are markedly unsuccessful. We conclude that by raising both poverty and inequality, divorce has important welfare consequences.

Demographic and clinical risk factors are important in guiding vaccination policy for pneumococcal pneumonia. We present data on these variables from a population-based surveillance network covering adult bacteraemic pneumococcal pneumonia (BPP) in the Delaware Valley region from 2002 to 2004. Surveillance data were used with U.S. Census data and a community health survey to calculate stratified incidence rates. Missing data were handled using multiple imputation. Overall rates of adult BPP were 106 cases/100 000 person-years. Elevated rates were seen in the elderly (>65 years), Native Americans, African Americans, the less-educated (less than high-school education), the poor, smokers, and individuals with histories of asthma, cancer, or diabetes. Multivariable modeling suggested that income was more robustly associated with risk than African American race. Of methodological interest, this association was not apparent if census block-group median income was used as a proxy for self-reported income. Further research on socioeconomic risk factors for BPP is needed.