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This paper links Native American racial self-identification with the rise in tribal gaming across the United States. We find that state policy changes allowing tribes to open casinos are associated with an increase in the probability that individuals with American Indian ancestors will self-identify as Native American and a decrease in the probability that individuals with no American Indian ancestry will self-identify as Native American. Moreover, we find that the magnitudes of the impacts are increasing in the strength of American Indian ancestral ties. Similar results hold when causal identification comes from American Indian casino openings across states over time and suggestive evidence shows stronger impacts if casinos are likely to pay per capita dividend payments to their members. These results are consistent with a conceptual framework in which we tie racial identification to economic motivations as well as social stigma associated with affiliating with a racial group for those without documented ancestral ties. Our results underscore the importance of economic incentives and social factors underlying the individual choice of racial identity.

This article reviews evidence on the labor market performance of Hispanics in the United States, with a particular focus on the US-born segment of this population. After discussing critical issues that arise in the US data sources commonly used to study Hispanics, we document how Hispanics currently compare with other Americans in terms of education, earnings, and labor supply, and then we discuss long-term trends in these outcomes. Relative to non-Hispanic Whites, US-born Hispanics from most national origin groups possess sizeable deficits in earnings, which in large part reflect corresponding educational deficits. Over time, rates of high school completion by US-born Hispanics have almost converged to those of non-Hispanic Whites, but the large Hispanic deficits in college completion have instead widened. Finally, from the perspective of immigrant generations, Hispanics experience substantial improvements in education and earnings between first-generation immigrants and the second-generation consisting of the US-born children of immigrants. Continued progress beyond the second generation is obscured by measurement issues arising from high rates of Hispanic intermarriage and the fact that later-generation descendants of Hispanic immigrants often do not self-identify as Hispanic when they come from families with mixed ethnic origins.

We explore whether fear of apprehension affects immigrants' labor market engagement by examining how ICE removals due to immigration violations and increased awareness of immigration raids impact their labor market outcomes. We find that ICE deportations are associated with reductions in the labor force participation and employment of likely undocumented immigrants when compared to similarly skilled foreign-born U.S.citizens. Effects are particularly strong among women, especially those with children, as well as in industries likely targeted by ICE raids. Controlling for perceived threats and de jure immigration policies has little impact on these results.

The literature on immigrant assimilation and intergenerational progress has sometimes reached surprising conclusions, such as the puzzle of immigrant advantage which finds that Hispanic immigrants sometimes have better health than U.S.-born Hispanics. While numerous studies have attempted to explain these patterns, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify immigrants' descendants. This can lead to bias due to "ethnic attrition," which occurs whenever a U.S.-born descendant of a Hispanic immigrant fails to self-identify as Hispanic. In this paper, we exploit information on parents' and grandparents' place of birth to show that Mexican ethnic attrition, operating through intermarriage, is sizable and selective on health, making subsequent generations of Mexican immigrants appear less healthy than they actually are. Consequently, conventional estimates of health disparities between Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites as well as those between Mexican Americans and recent Mexican immigrants have been significantly overstated.

Antman and Duncan (2014, 2015) document how racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. The main contribution of our work was to show that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. A coding error was recently brought to our attention that resulted in 0.55% of our sample being misclassified in terms of their African ancestry. This paper provides details of the coding error and explores its implications. Although the error only affected a tiny percent of the overall sample, correcting it changes the conclusion of how multiracial blacks respond to state affirmative action bans, from a negative and statically significant effect to a small positive and statistically significant effect. Correcting the error does not change the conclusions for individuals with only or no African ancestry. None of the Asian ancestry classifications were affected by the coding error and thus none of the results for Asians were impacted. In addition, we present an updated analysis using more detailed ancestry classifications and more recent years of data. We continue to find that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy, albeit with a different conclusion for multiracial blacks, and are now able to distinguish stronger effects for multiracial individuals with more distant connections to their minority group.

Numerous studies find that U.S.-born Hispanics differ significantly from non-Hispanic whites on important measures of human capital, including health. Nevertheless, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify immigrants' U.S.-born descendants. This can lead to bias due to "ethnic attrition," which occurs whenever a U.S.-born descendant of a Hispanic immigrant fails to self-identify as Hispanic. This paper shows that Mexican American ethnic attritors are generally more likely to display health outcomes closer to those of non-Hispanic whites. This biases conventional estimates of Mexican American health away from suggesting patterns of assimilation and convergence with non-Hispanic whites.

This paper explores the labor market and schooling effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which provides work authorization to eligible immigrants along with a temporary reprieve from deportation. The analysis relies on a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the discontinuity in program rules to compare eligible individuals to ineligible, likely undocumented immigrants before and after the program went into effect. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we focus on youths that likely met DACA's schooling requirement when the program was announced. We find that DACA reduced the probability of school enrollment of eligible higher-educated individuals, as well as some evidence that it increased the employment likelihood of men, in particular. Together, these findings suggest that a lack of authorization may lead individuals to enroll in school when working is not a viable option. Thus, once employment restrictions are relaxed and the opportunity costs of higher-education rise, eligible individuals may reduce investments in schooling.

It is almost universally assumed that race is an exogenously given trait that is not subject to change. But as race is most often self-reported by individuals who must weigh the costs and benefits of associating with minority groups, we ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. To address this question, we link racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies in higher education, contracting, and employment. Consistent with supporting evidence showing that individuals from underrepresented minority groups face an incentive to identify under affirmative action, we find that once affirmative action is outlawed, they are less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, we find that individuals from overrepresented minority groups, who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action, are more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action is banned. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a causal relationship between racial self-identification and economic incentives in the United States. As such, it has broad implications for understanding the impact of affirmative action policies, estimating broader trends in racial disparities, and the emerging literature on the construction of race and individual identity.