Search

AbstractWhat is the role of migration in regional evolutions? I document that within-US migration causes a reduction in the unemployment rate of the receiving city over several years. To establish this causal effect, I construct an instrument using out-migration of other places and predict its destination from historical patterns. The decline in unemployment is due to housing. Housing is durable, so increased demand causes a surge of new houses and construction jobs. Additionally, migrants’ housing demand raises prices, increasing borrowing and nontradable employment. This finding implies the endogenous response of migration amplifies local labor demand shocks by about a third. (JEL J61, J64, R21, R23, R31)

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles published in the October 2015 issue of the journal such as "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "RFK Was a Crummy Lawyer" by James Neff, and an article on the U.S. Constitution by Yoni Applebaum.

Wider adoption of Lean‐Agile software development methods has prompted interest in tailoring these small team methods to meet the needs of larger organizations. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for Lean Software Development incorporates many Lean‐Agile best practices and has become a leading proposition for applying agile methods at scale (Leffingwell 2016). To help managers visualize how SAFe might work for their organization, we have created a management flight simulator based on a system dynamics model of SAFe. Using these tools, decision makers who consider transitioning their organizations to SAFe can perform virtual experiments by changing parameters such as team size, developer experience level, sprint length, and whether developers perform continuous integration to explore how these programmatic decisions affect the rate at which work is completed. Such process prototyping can provide a justification for adopting SAFe, which often includes costly training and organizational restructuring, by forming a basis for quantifying return on investment. We applied our system dynamics model to a real program and showed that instituting continuous integration can improve throughput by 54% while decreasing defects by 88%.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to previous issues related to fire fighting, including "The Ten Commandments: Command-Ment II" in the April 2007 issue, "Seabelts: They're Our Friends" and "Why Do Burning Building Collapse?"

The article focuses on the tax issues that sellers using structured sales must consider. Structured sales include a third party besides the buyer and seller. The third party has a big financial stake in the transaction, and most often, it is the government. The primary tax issues in such sales situations are when and how income is taxed. The methods of deferring income associated with structured sales are also discussed.