The productive characteristics of migrating individuals, emigrant selection, affect welfare. The empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data. This paper uses a new and better dataset to address both issues: the ENET (Mexican Labor Survey), which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non-migrants. This dataset presents a relevant dichotomy: it shows on average negative selection for Mexican emigrants to the United States for the period 2000-2004 together with positive selection in Mexican emigration out of rural Mexico to the United States in the same period. Three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested. Whereas higher skill prices in Mexican than in the US are enough to explain negative selection in urban Mexico, its combination with network effects and wealth constraints is required to account for positive selection in rural Mexico.

Standard explanations for the observed income heterogeneity within US communities rely on heterogeneity of the housing stock and differences of preferences across households. We propose a dynamic stochastic model of location and tenure choice where homes are identical within locations and households initially differ according to income only. The model highlights how differences in the timing of moves generate income heterogeneity across homeowners, in particular within communities that experience strong positive demand shocks. Using US Census data, we provide evidence of the relevance of this income mixing mechanism. Our empirical findings suggest that incorporating information on time since moved and tenure choice may be useful in the estimation of equilibrium sorting models and of households willingness to pay for local amenities, especially so in communities with a history of strong housing price growth.

This paper uses data from the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Censuses to study the impacts ofimmigration on local housing markets. Specifically, I use matched tract-level data from the twoCensuses to study the effects of changes in the number of immigrants on rental prices in a tract.Without other controls, the results indicate that tracts with larger inflows of immigrants between1990 and 2000 had slower rental price growth, with evidence of differential impacts for Hispanicand non-Hispanic immigrants. However, once controls are added for the changingsocioeconomic composition of tracts, the direct effects of immigrants fall in magnitude andbecome economically and statistically insignificant. These findings are consistent with previousresearch which argues that immigrants effects on the local housing market have to do more withtheir socioeconomic characteristics than with the fact that they are immigrants.

If America is a nation of immigrants, then the story of the country’s economic progress is very much the combined story of the progress of its numerous constituent immigrant groups. For reasons of national import as well as local interest, this paper will investigate the incomes of Arab-Americans. Our initial question asks if Arab-Americans earn more than the average American. It will be seen that this question must be re-stated; do foreign born Arab-Americans earn above average? While it is natural to analyze income differentials in terms of country of origin of the migrants, our goal is to explain these differentials in terms of more basic income determinants, such as gender, age, urban residence, and education. About thirty percent of the inhabitants of the city of Dearborn (a city adjacent to Detroit) claim Arab ancestry, so the comparison between the national data and the local situation is most attractive. 1 During 2003 a group of researchers affiliated with the University of Michigan conducted surveys (the DAAS) in the metropolitan area of Detroit relating to several aspects of the Arab-American population’s social and demographic characteristics.2 Coming soon after the 9/11 attacks, the social attitudes and experiences of this important group were the prime focus of the study. Although the level of household income was not a main focus of the DAAS study, it was recorded, and Baker et al. (2004, p. 9) comment on it that “Arabs and Chaldeans are disproportionately represented among the area’s wealthiest and poorest households.” They provide the following Graph DAAS, which shows that the distributional curve for the ArabAmericans and Chaldeans is flatter than for the general population. The graph also suggests a relatively similar level of average income between these two groups. This curious result, that this socio-geographically defined group would tend to concentrate at both ends of the income spectrum, was the initial motivation for this paper, which seeks to . . .

This article exploits an unusual aspect of the policy for enforcement of the federal 1968 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which made filing an age discrimination claim less burdensome in some states. After the enforcement of the federal law, white male workers over age 50 in states where the federal government allows an easier filing procedure were .2 percentage points less likely to be hired than were workers in states without such laws. They also worked .8-1.3 fewer weeks per year and were .5-.7 percentage points more likely to report being retired, 1.6-1.8 percentage points more likely to report that they are not in the labor force, and 1.6-3 percentage points more likely to report that they are not employed. These findings suggest that in an antiage-discrimination environment, firms seek to avoid litigation through means not intended by the legislation-by not employing older workers in the first place.

It was not long ago when the lens viewing urban America displayed chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs. Popular funk bands of the 1970s such as Parliament with their mega-hit Chocolate Cities helped mold this understanding through musical lyres that described Amercan urban areas becoming darker and poorer while suburbs were emerging white and rich (Avila, 2004). Of course, cities were not always understood in these terms historically; most were the homes of the middle class even while poorer immigrants landed there to explore their social and economic aspirations. But the great black migrations out of the South to the North in the early and mid 1900s, coupled with de jure and de facto Jim Crow discrimination that limited the economic and residential opportunities of blacks, began to change the socio-economic and racial profile of cities. This, in conjunction with rapid suburbanization of mostly middle-income whites in the post war period, left central cities with growing concentrations of poverty, especially minority poverty, thereby sealing the connection between race, place and poverty. Central cities were increasingly seen as black and poor, while suburbs were emerging white and as the main regions of population and employment growth and wealth creation.

With the United States experiencing levels of immigration of historic proportions, the central question is whether the immigrants and their children will move ahead. That issue is of particular importance for Mexican immigrants, who comprise almost a third of the U.S. foreign-born population. The Mexican immigrants of the turn of the 21st century are the latest arrivals in a century-long migration. They enter the U.S. economy with disproportionately low levels of schools; many arrive without legal status; they converge on low-level, low-status jobs in which Mexican immigrants have often labored, making it likely that historic patterns of discrimination and prejudice will attach to these latest arrivals. Given this migration’s size, its characteristics, and its history, the trajectory of Mexican immigrants and their descendents is a crucial, perhaps the crucial, issue in immigration research in the United States today. As this paper shows, despite these unfavorable conditions, migration does yield mobility, though the extent of upward movement varies depending on the comparative frame. As the migrants experience high employment rates, new arrivals in the United . . .

The paper analyzes trends in the dispersion of earnings within occupations in the Current Population Survey since 1968 and the decennial U.S. Census since 1960. New media technologies make it easier to transmit certain kinds of work, such as athletic performances, to wider audiences around the world, enhancing the relative payoffs to the most-favored performers. Earnings inequality rose within these occupations, consistent with the superstars effect described by Rosen (1981). Earnings inequality rose within occupations which call for working closely with new semiconductor and information technologies, such as electrical engineers and computer programmers. It is argued that these occupations experienced technological uncertainty, which leads to extraordinary opportunities, obsolescence, and therefore turbulence. The uncertainty and superstars effects would naturally occur to some extent in many occupations. Therefore we examine also occupations in which these effects are likely to be the weakest those that call for personal interaction with other individuals. On average inequality within occupations at this other extreme has not risen.

The retail store is a ubiquitous feature of the modern American economy. Over 15 million Americans, 11.3 percent of the work force, work in retail trade. 1 Retailers employ more workers than all other private employers except professional/business services and the healthcare industry. Retail sales account for over 43 percent of personal consumption and 30 percent of GDP. Only manufacturing and wholesale sales are a larger share of the economy. 2 While these figures provide an indication of the size of the industry, they do not …

We are experiencing a wave of globalization that includes everything but labour.In this paper, we argue that this is the result of restrictive migration policies implementedby destination countries. In democratic societies individual attitudes of votersrepresent the foundations of policy making. To understand policy outcomes, weanalyse the patterns and determinants of voters opinions on immigration. We findthat, across countries of different income levels, only a small minority of voters favourmore open policies. Furthermore, our analysis supports the role played by economicchannels in shaping public opinion. We next investigate how attitudes translateinto policy outcomes, considering two alternative frameworks: the median voter andthe interest groups model. On the one hand, the very low percentages of voters favouringimmigration are, in light of the existing restrictive policies, consistent with themedian voter framework. At the same time, given the extent of opposition toimmigration that appears in public opinion, it is somewhat surprising in a medianvoter framework that immigration takes place at all. We find that interest-groupsdynamics have the potential to explain this puzzle.

Trial by one's peers is a foundation of the American legal system. In this paper, I present evidence that in addition to legally relevant facts, financial incentives influence the jury deliberation process. I take advantage of cross county variation in the opportunity cost of serving as a juror, and find that a 10% increase in juror compensation increases the time juries spend deliberating by 5%. While preliminary, these results suggest that the opportunity cost of jurors' time does influence how long they spend determining legal culpability, which has implications for legal and sociological research on deliberation length and judicial outcomes. In addition, jurors are able to choose they number of hours they work without the typical labor demand constraints faced by workers, and in particular low wage workers. My results suggest that the failure of existing empirical studies to identify an intensive labor supply response to wage changes is due to incorrect specification of the demand for low wage labor and measurement error in hours worked.

Feliciano examines how immigrants compare to those left behind in their origin countries, and how that selection affects the educational adaptation of children of immigrants in the United States. Her findings contradict the assumption that immigrants are negatively selected: nearly all immigrants are more educated than the populations in their home countries, but Asian immigrants are the most highly selected. This helps explain the Asian second generations' superior educational attainment as compared to Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans, or Latin Americans. The book challenges cultural explanations for ethnic differences by highlighting how inequalities in the relative pre-migration educational attainments of immigrants are reproduced among their children in the U.S.

One-third of children in the United States are born to unmarried parents. A substantial number of black and Hispanic children live with a never-married mother. Children of never-married mothers are more likely to drop out of high school, repeat grades, and have behavioral problems than are children raised in more traditional family structures. But these relationships may be driven by other factors that affect marital status at birth, post-conception marriage decisions, and later child outcomes, rather than causal effects of family structure. Given that changes in the availability of men in the marriage market should affect marriage decisions, we use incarceration rates for men as an instrumental variable for family structure in estimating the effect of never-married motherhood on the likelihood that children drop out of high school, focusing on blacks and Hispanics. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that unobserved factors rather than a causal effect drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child outcomes for blacks and Hispanics, at least for the children of women whose marriage decisions are most affected by variation in incarceration rates for men. For Hispanics, in particular, we find evidence that these children may actually be better off living with a never-married mother.

The advent of new emerging technologies such as ubiquitous mobile computing, telemedicine, Internet, grid computing, embedded systems and wireless sensor networks (WSN) offers great potentials to radically alter the existing modes of healthcare administration and delivery in developing nations. The phenomenon of 'standalone hospitals' and a healthcare delivery service paradigm that always requires a physical ono-on-one contact between the patient and the medical expert even for cases of simple diagnosis, needs to be radically altered. In this study, we present the design of a national healthcare grid infrastructure, based on a novel integration of wireless sensor networks and wireless grid computing, for the purpose of inter-hospital collaboration and pervasive real-time monitoring of healthcare patients. This holds the promise of improving the nature of healthcare delivery services in developing nations.

This paper analyzes the evolution of African American entrepreneurship by comparing the patterns of development of African American entrepreneurship and immigrant entrepreneurship. Whereas most literature focuses on African American culture as the reason for limited entrepreneurial success compared to certain immigrant groups, this paper examines how social, economic, and political forces have adversely influenced the development of Black entrepreneurship compared to various immigrant groups. Using 90 years of census data, we also find empirical support consistent with our assertion that many immigrants have resources (not available to native non-Whites) that facilitate entrepreneurship.