Although a sizable fraction of the Puerto Rican-born population moved to the United States, the island also received large inflows of persons born outside Puerto Rico. Hence Puerto Rico provides a 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.

Introduction: This report analyzes how well the residents of Washington Heights/Inwood (WH/IN) have fared on selected health indicators set forth by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygene between 2000 and 2005. Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates. Results: Immigrant families in particular face a multitude of health concerns, as well as specific barriers to accessing health care services. The socioeconomic and health disparities faced by WH/IN residents lead to the recognition that health promotion and disease management in immigrant communities such as WH/IN can be most effective by way of improvements in the socioeconomic conditions of residents. Although health insurance coverage has been found to be an important predictor of access to health care, our findings show that WH/IN residents are less likely to have health insurance than their NYC peers, with low-income Dominicans having the highest rate of Medicaid coverage among all foreign-born and Mexicans being the immigrant group most likely to be uninsured. In addition, over a third of the adult population in WH/IN was without a regular health-care provider in 2005. Discussion: Understanding the ecology of existing health disparities of immigrant communities such as the one in WH/IN may move NYC closer to meeting the unique needs of this growing population, both currently and in the future, and provide insights into how to address future immigrant health challenges.

This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of education.The first chapter estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on educational attainment and adult health. My instrumental variables strategy exploits a change of the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states that was phased in beginning in 1963. Identification is achieved by the fact that different birth cohorts were exposed to different degrees to the original formula and the new formula, along with the fact that the change of the formula affected states differentially by per capita income. Participation in the program as a child appears to have few long-run effects on health, but the effects on educational attainment are sizable. The second chapter studies the issue of racial diversity in higher education. I estimate the effects of college racial diversity on post-college earnings, civic behavior, and satisfaction with the college attended. I use the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, which allows me to control for exposure to racial diversity prior to college. Moreover, I use two techniques from Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) to address the issue of selection on unobservables. Single-equation estimates suggest a positive effect of diversity on voting behavior and on satisfaction with the college attended, but I do not find an effect on other outcomes. Moreover, the estimates are very sensitive to the assumptions made about selection on unobservables.The third chapter studies university affirmative action bans. I use information on the timing of bans along with data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate the effects of such bans on college enrollment and educational attainment.

The 1947 Presidents Commission on Higher Education, popularly known as the Truman Commission, offered a remarkable vision, one of an expansive, inclusive and diverse system of post secondary education in the United States. It appeared just as hundreds of thousands of former GIs poured onto the nations campuses, taking advantage of a little heralded program to provide tuition and other benefits to veterans of the recently concluded World War II. As it turned out, both of these events signaled the beginning of a remarkable period of expansion in higher education. The postwar years have been described as the third great period of growth in the history of American education, a development that took decades to unfold.1 While the Commission suggested that nearly half of the nations youth could benefit from collegiate education, it limited its projections to just thirteen years (to 1960). In fact, it took more than twice as long to approach such high levels of popular participation in higher education, and the most dramatic growth occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. In other respects, however, the Presidents commissioners projections for change in enrollment patterns look remarkably prescient in retrospect. Even if they missed the timing of college growth and the significant role women played in it, their report still managed to anticipate a very broad process of change. By 1980 the collegiate student population had come to embody much of...

Previous study by Card and Lewis (2005) has found (puzzling) that inflows of Mexican immigrants into new metropolitan areas have had no effect on the relative wages of very low-skill (high school dropouts). Rather, Mexican workers do affect relative wages for high school graduates. Whereas Card and Lewis study uses variations across geographies, this paper considers variations across occupations. Recognizing that Mexican immigrants are highly occupationally clustered (disproportionately work in distinctive very low wage occupations), we use this fact to motivate the empirical approach to analyze the relationship between the composition of Mexican immigrants across occupations/industries and average wages in the occupations/industries. To summarize our finding, we confirm that in spite of the fact that Mexican immigrants are disproportionately in low-skill occupations, (which we define as occupations where the average workers have no high school education), we find no significant impact of Mexican immigrants on wages in those occupations. By contrast, inflows of Mexican immigrants have some small effects on the wages of native workers in medium-skill occupations (which we define as occupations where the average worker has at least some high school education or is a high school graduate). These results suggest potential spill over effects as natives may be reallocating their labor supply into non-predominant Mexican occupations. An analysis of employment changes of natives into different occupation groupings in response to an inflow of Mexican immigrants, confirms that natives employment in occupations where the average worker has a high school education increases in response to Mexican inflows in the U.S labor force from previous periods.

Does military service affect the subsequent civilian wages and income of those who serve? If it does, is the effect positive or negative? Do those positive or negative effects impact certain groups of veterans more than others? Thesequestions may be more relevant today than ever before. The war in Iraq is the first major extended conflict that has been waged without using conscription to bolster the military rolls. As the United States enters the fourth year of this war, the military is struggling to meet its recruiting targets. Is the compensation packagethat the all volunteer force offers enough to maintain the troop strength required to win an extended conflict? Training and experience represent a large part of thecompensation for military service. Does that training and experience translate into higher civilian wages? This paper analyzes 2003 IPUMS data and finds that overall there are no significant civilian wage differences between male veterans and male non-veterans. However, the data show that veterans with less than a high school education receive a 13.6% wage premium compared to non-veterans with the same level of education while high school graduates receive a 3.8% premium. The data also show that Hispanic veterans receive a 17.9% wage premium compared to nonveteran Hispanics, while Whites suffer a 1.7% wage penalty.

Samuel Huntington argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristic of Hispanic immi- grants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the countrys dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identi?cation as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the U.S. Census and national and Los Angeles opinion surveys, we show that Hispanics acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born whites. Moreover, a clear majority of Hispanics reject a purely ethnic identi?cation and patriotism grows from one generation to the next. At present, a traditional pattern of political assimilation appears to prevail.

College-educated workers are more likely than others to make lasting, long-distance moves, but little is known about the role of college itself in determining geographic mobility. Unobservable characteristics related to selection into college might also drive the relationship between college education and geographic mobility. Using the 5% sample from the 1980 U.S. Census, we provide instrumental variables estimates of the impact of college education on the probability of a long-distance move. We use cohort-level and state-level variation in college attendance and completion arising from draft avoidance behavior among men at risk for conscription into the Armed Forces during the Vietnam conflict to identify the causal effect of college. We find that college completion and some college attendance both significantly increase the probability of a long-distance move. Our preferred estimates imply that graduation increases the probability that a man resides outside his birth state by approximately 15 percentage points. Moreover, using individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979, we find that over half of the mobility advantage to college graduates remains after controlling for ability, parental education, and parental mobility histories while the mobility advantage of students with some college is entirely explained by these factors. (JEL: J61, J24, I23)

Theories of metropolitan development in the United States explain that higher status populations tend to occupy newer housing while lower status groups tend to be restricted to older housing. The housing system thus reflects the broader stratification structure and likely changes in response to important shifts like the steep rise of income inequality at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, a striking trend of increasingly large houses with many amenities emerged in U.S. metropolitan areas during this period, indicating that new construction may have become ever more exclusive and targeted to the affluent as inequality rose. In this article, I investigate whether the stratifying impact of new house construction intensified along with growing inequality and changing house structures using a variety of U.S. Census Bureau sources, examining both trends in the income level of new house buyers and the relationship of housing growth to affluent residential segregation. I find striking evidence that new housing did become much more dominated by the affluent, and was increasingly stratifying and segregating at the end of the twentieth century. These changes may exacerbate inequality in the future through opportunity structures linked to place of residence, including access to education and the accumulation of housing equity.

Theoretical perspectives on residential mobility typically view household outcomes as reasonable approximations of the outcomes for all individuals in the household. For many couple-headed households, however, residential mobility has different implications for the careers of each partner. We use matched data from the 2000-2005 March Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey to investigate the relationship between family status, residential mobility and short-term labor market outcomes for working-age couples in the United States. We find that, on average, the short-term impact of residential mobility on household income is insignificant. However, dual-earner couples who move out of state become more equal with respect to hours and earnings.

Theories of metropolitan development in the United States explain that higher status populations tend to occupy newer housing while lower status groups tend to be restricted to older housing. The housing system thus reflects the broader stratification structure and likely changes in response to important shifts like the steep rise of income inequality at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, a striking trend of increasingly large houses with many amenities emerged in U.S. metropolitan areas during this period, indicating that new construction may have become ever more exclusive and targeted to the affluent as inequality rose. In this article, I investigate whether the stratifying impact of new house construction intensified along with growing inequality and changing house structures using a variety of U.S. Census Bureau sources, examining both trends in the income level of new house buyers and the relationship of housing growth to affluent residential segregation. I find striking evidence that new housing did become much more dominated by the affluent, and was increasingly stratifying and segregating at the end of the twentieth century. These changes may exacerbate inequality in the future through opportunity structures linked to place of residence, including access to education and the accumulation of housing equity.

The Early California Population Project is a database recently completed by research scholars at the Henry E. Huntington Library. The project is part of a wave of new databases that are opening up various regions of Early America for additional study; yet, unlike other databases, the Early California Population Project's records are overwhelmingly of Indians. The database offers new opportunities for historians and anthropologists interested in Indians, Catholic missions, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and family and community formation along the Spanish colonial frontier of North America between 1769 and 1850.Almost ten years in the making, the ECPP is an online computer database of all the information recorded in the baptism, marriage, and burial registers kept by missionaries and parish priests in Alta California between 1769 and 1850. As such, the ECPP provides access to information found in records now scattered across California that are too old and too fragile for most scholars to handle. Microfilm copies of the original registers exist in some archives, yet they are of variable quality. Understanding and interpreting these registers, written as they are in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish script, can demand rare skills and enormous effort. Lacking adequate staff or the resources to support genealogical or historical research, California libraries, archives, missions, and dioceses each year have been forced to turn away numerous individuals who are eager to study early California's Indian, Spanish, and Anglo-American inhabitants. Furthermore, because of barriers to access, scholars of colonial California and the Spanish and Mexican Southwest too often have not been able to incorporate the valuable information found in the sacramental records into their own research.

Although references to exploitation are commonplace in sociology, the empirical investigation of exploitation has been neglected. Adopting a Weberian approach that defines exploitation asunderpayment in the market, we investigate data for U.S. manufacturing industries from 1971 to 1996. The results indicate high levels of exploitation among employees who are female, Hispanic, professionals,blue-collar workers, and service or sales workers. By contrast, workers who are significantly overpaid relative to their productivities include older workers, married workers, those with a college degree, and technicians. These latter groups obtain a substantial profit in theiremployment due to their unusually high salaries, net of their other measured characteristics. While we caution that our results pertain only to the manufacturing sector during this time period, our analysisnonetheless demonstrates that the empirical investigation of exploitation is feasible, and that it provides informative insights into economic sociology and social stratification.

This paper identifies the main forces that contributed to the decline in labor force participation in New England between 2007 and 2015, as well as the forces that moderated the region's decline relative to that of the nation. This exercise contributes to an assessment of the outlook for participation in New England moving forward. Similar to previous findings pertaining to the United States as a whole, the single largest factor in the recent decline in labor force participation in New England was the shifting age composition of the region's population. In particular, the share of New England residents at or above retirement age (65 and over) increased by a considerable margin, while the share of residents of prime working ages (25 to 54) decreased, and these demographic trends were more pronounced in the region than in the nation as a whole between 2007 and 2015. Partly offsetting the region's demographic disadvantages, the participation rate among those ages 65 and over increased more sharply in New England than in the United States since 2007, while the participation rate among prime-age workers decreased less sharply in the region than in the nation. Together, these advantages can more than account for the lesser decline in labor force participation in the region compared with the United States between 2007 and 2015.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is a favorite of the World Bank, numerous world leaders, and politicians in both parties in the United States. His work has been so influential that he has been considered for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Perhaps de Soto's prescription for the ills of developing economies is so influential because it seems so simple. He claims that if poor people in the Third World are given formal title to the assets they currently hold extra-legally, they will be able to generate capital, the surplus value that produces wealth. This article raises some cautionary notes, concluding that things are not so simple. It examines whether poor people who have formal title to their homes in the US, the country de Soto uses as his paramount example, experience the benefits that de Soto attributes to formal ownership. The article finds that the expansion of the ownership society to include the poor does produce many of the benefits de Soto claims. The greatest benefit is increased access to the markets for both residential real estate and mortgage loans. However, much of the wealth accruing from poor people's participation in these markets goes to market participants other than the poor. For example, many poor homeowners who seek to enhance their wealth by accessing more credit are victimized by predatory lenders who capture the wealth. For many also, the conversion of debt into long-term improvement of welfare is an uncertain and difficult process. For those who epitomize de Soto's hypothesis by using their formal title as an aid in starting small businesses, the path is especially complex and uncertain. In the end, there is no clear connection between property formalization and greater social welfare. This lesson in turn provides useful information about what it is reasonable to expect from rule of law reforms.

This dissertation develops a discrete choice equilibrium model to evaluate the benefits of the air quality improvements that occurred in the Los Angeles area following the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). Large improvements in air quality will change the desirability of different neighborhoods, disrupting the equilibrium of the housing market. The discrete choice equilibrium approach accounts for the fact that air quality improvements brought about by the 1990 CAAA will change housing choices and prices. The dissertation makes two empirical contributions to public economics. First, the study provides the first application of the discrete choice equilibrium framework (Anas, 1982, Bayer et al., 2005) to the valuation of large environmental changes. Second, the study provides new evidence for the distributional benefits of the 1990 CAAA in the Los Angeles area. Households' location choices are modeled according to the random utility framework of McFadden (1978) and the differentiated product specification of Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995). The model is estimated with public-use household microdata from the 1990 U.S. Census. Findings suggest that the air quality improvements that occurred in the Los Angeles area between 1990 and 2000 provided an average equilibrium welfare benefit of $1,800 to households. In contrast, average benefits are $1,400 when equilibrium price effects are not accounted, demonstrating that ignoring equilibrium effects will likely underestimate the benefits of large environmental changes. We find that the equilibrium welfare impacts of the 1990 CAAA in the Los Angeles area varied significantly across income groups. Households in the highest income quartile experienced equilibrium benefits of approximately $3,600 as compared to only $400 for households in the lowest income quartile. We also find that ignoring equilibrium adjustments in housing prices can significantly alter the distribution of relative welfare gains (i.e. welfare gains as a proportion of household income) across households. Indeed, welfare impacts that do not account for equilibrium adjustments suggest that high-income households experience larger relative welfare gains compared to low-income households. However, when accounting for equilibrium adjustments, we find that the distribution of relative welfare gains from the 1990 CAAA is fairly even across income groups.

Empirical evidence illustrates that diversity generates both economic costs and benefits. This paper develops a theoretical model that accounts for the positive and deleterious effects of heterogeneity. First, an expanded Solow Growth Model demonstrates that the direct effects of diversity can be positive or negative, and depend upon the size of fixed parameter values. Second, diversity also influences individuals’ location decisions. Segregation (variation of diversity across regions) always reduces national output per worker, so if diversity induces integration, it indirectly augments productivity as well. Finally, political policies aimed at reducing interaction costs across groups may actually reduce aggregate output per worker by encouraging segregation.

In this paper, we examine net emigration from Mexico over the period 1960 to 2000. The data are consistent with labor-supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to Mexican emigration, accounting for two fifths of Mexican labor flows to the U.S. over the last two decades of the 20th century. Net emigration rates by Mexican state birth-year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the Mexican cohort, relative to the corresponding U.S. cohort. In states with long histories of emigration, the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong, consistent with the existence of pre-existing networks.