Search

Using a recent and rich Spanish data set on immigrants, we examine the impact of legal status on two measures of labor market performance: the likelihood of being employed and earnings. The Spanish case is of special interest given the rapid increase in immigration over the past 15 years and the large number of amnesties granted during the 1990s and 2000s. We find that a 10 per cent increase in the share of legal immigrants would raise the overall employment likelihood of immigrants by 4 percentage points and their earnings by 3.3 per cent. The results, which prove robust to alternative sample specifications, confirm the well-known importance of being legal for the economic assimilation of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction summarizes the five manuscripts included in this special volume titled "The Family in Public Finance." Included in the special issue are international comparisons of work family policies, the tax treatment of families versus individuals, and the role that flexible work schedules may play in fertility decisions. Additionally, there are two country-specific studies, one examining the role of the public budget in family planning in Spain, and one examining parents' willingness to pay for their children's postsecondary education in relation to the generosity of government subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis that foreign direct investment into the United States responds to variations in exchange-rate levels and to exchange-rate uncertainty is tested for the period 1976-1998. We account for nonstationarity and cointegration in the data series and use conditional measures of exchange-rate uncertainty. While a long-run relationship exists among foreign direct investment in-flows as a share of GNP, the real exchange rate, and the GARCH measure of exchange-rate volatility, we find no discernible link between the real exchange rate and inward foreign direct investment in the short run. We also conclude that foreign direct investment decreases in response to increases in exchange-rate uncertainty in the short run when we use a conditional measure of exchange-rate uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct a pooled cross-section and time-series analysis of the unemployment rates across ten major industries in the U.S. from 1983 to 1994 to assess the effect of NAFTA and immigration. Our results indicate that the output produced by the industry, unemployment benefit coverage, and interest rates are significant determinants of industry unemployment rates, but union presence does not affect industry unemployment. Both Canadian and Mexican immigrants appear to be complements to the U.S. labor force, with Canadian immigrants highly complementary to American labor. Finally, the Chow test provides no evidence that NAFTA has changed the structure of unemployment determination in these industries.

Ruggles, S., Genadek, K., Goeken, R., Grover, J., & and Sobek, M. (2017). Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 7.0 [Data set]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V7.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between immigration enforcement and institutionalization rates of the elderly. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the Secure Communities (SC) immigration enforcement program across U.S. counties from 2008 through 2014, we show that SC led to a 0.26 percentage points (6.8 percent) increase in the likelihood that Americans aged 65 and above live in an institution. Supportive of supply shocks in the household services market as a central mechanism, we find that the elderly who are most likely to purchase domestic worker services are also the most likely to move into nursing homes following the implementation of SC. Additionally, we find suggestive evidence of significant reductions in the work hours of housekeepers, personal care aides, and home health workers hinting at the critical role of negative supply shocks in occupations that facilitate aging in community., (Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Background: Mexican migrants traveling across the Mexico-United States (U.S.) border region represent a large, highly mobile, and socially vulnerable subset of Mexican nationals. Population-level health data for this group is hard to obtain given their geographic dispersion, mobility, and largely unauthorized status in the U.S. Over the last 14 years, the Migrante Project has implemented a unique migration framework and novel methodological approach to generate population-level estimates of disease burden and healthcare access for migrants traversing the Mexico-U.S. border. This paper describes the rationale and history of the Migrante Project and the protocol for the next phases of the project., Methods/design: In the next phases, two probability, face-to-face surveys of Mexican migrant flows will be conducted at key crossing points in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and Matamoros ( N  = 1,200 each). Both survey waves will obtain data on demographics, migration history, health status, health care access, COVID-19 history, and from biometric tests. In addition, the first survey will focus on non-communicable disease (NCD), while the second will dive deeper into mental health and substance use. The project will also pilot test the feasibility of a longitudinal dimension with 90 survey respondents that will be re-interviewed by phone 6 months after completing the face-to-face baseline survey., Discussion: Interview and biometric data from the Migrante project will help to characterize health care access and health status and identify variations in NCD-related outcomes, mental health, and substance use across migration phases. The results will also set the basis for a future longitudinal extension of this migrant health observatory. Analyses of previous Migrante data, paired with data from these upcoming phases, can shed light on the impact of health care and immigration policies on migrants' health and inform policy and programmatic responses to improve migrant health in sending, transit, and receiving communities., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Martinez-Donate, Rangel, Correa, Bakely, Gonzalez-Fagoaga, González, Amuedo-Dorantes, Zhang, Magis-Rodriguez, Lê-Scherban, Guendelman and Parrado.)

This article examines changes in parental labor supply in response to the unanticipated closure of schools following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The authors collect detailed daily information on school closures at the school-district level, which they merge to individual-level data on labor supply and sociodemographic characteristics from the monthly Current Population Survey spanning from January 2019 through May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the authors find evidence of non-negligible labor supply reductions. Having a partner at home helped offset the negative effect of school closures, particularly for maternal employment, although respondents' job traits played a more significant role in shaping labor supply responses to school closures. Overall, the labor supply impacts of school closures prove robust to identification checks and to controlling for other coexistent social distancing measures. In addition, these early school closures seem to have had a long-lasting negative impact on parental labor supply., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

In response to the intensification of immigration enforcement in the interior of the USA, some school districts have implemented 'safe-zone' policies to protect students' academic progression and well-being. Using primary data from a sample of US-born children of unauthorized migrants, we document the detrimental effect of stricter immigration enforcement on children's educational outcomes and the benefits of safe-zone policies. Our analyses show that restricting immigration authorities' access to schools and providing counseling on immigration-related issues are crucial policy components in strengthening children's focus, effort, expectations, parental involvement, and relationships. These findings highlight the damaging impact of immigration enforcement on US-citizen children in mixed-status households and advance our understanding of the role of local policies in mitigating these effects., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Cross-border medical care, defined as care facilitated by a local health provider under pre-established regional agreements, as in the case of European Union (EU) citizens accessing care within EU countries, has been on the rise. Unlike medical tourism, typically sought by patients through their own volition and paid for out-of-pocket, cross-border medical care is often reimbursable or paid for directly by the responsible government. Yet, because nations vary in the extent of health coverage offered to their residents, these expenditures are often only partially reimbursed. The resulting financial burden for some countries can be large and not reciprocal, straining regional and country-level finances. We analyze the effectiveness of a legislative measure adopted by a Spanish region in January 2012 with the purpose of curbing cross-border medical care. Using a comprehensive administrative dataset of all medical procedures performed in the country between 2008 and 2015, we find that the measure led to a drastic drop in the number of foreigners' hospitalizations and a reduction of 4.8 million euros/trimester in costs. Finally, the decrease in hospitalizations did not disproportionally affect patients based on their gender, age, or origin, although it fostered a reduction in readmissions., (© 2022 The Authors. Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Between 2001 and 2018, more than 5.5 million Mexican migrants were removed from the United States or returned to Mexico with their families as immigration enforcement escalated. Learning how this transition affected their children-also referred to as "the invisibles"-is a policy-relevant topic for both the United States and Mexico. Using representative data on 7.6 million Mexican- and U.S.-born children from the 2015 Mexican Intercensal Survey, we provide evidence of the gaps in access to education and health care between these two groups and of the factors potentially responsible for the existing barriers. Relative to children born in Mexico, U.S.-born children are at a considerable disadvantage in terms of health care access, but less so in terms of education. Lack of a Mexican-issued birth certificate is among the persistent factors responsible for the gaps in services. Policies aimed at changing the approach to immigration enforcement in the United States, lessening paperwork requirements in Mexico, and easing access to documentation in both countries could improve transnational children's access to basic services, as well as their present and long-term well-being., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors.)

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Our estimates suggest that adopting safer-at-home orders or non-essential business closures 1 day before infections double can curtail the COVID-19 death rate by 1.9%. This finding proves robust to alternative measures of NPI adoption speed, model specifications that control for testing, other NPIs, and mobility and across various samples (national, the Northeast, excluding New York, and excluding the Northeast). We also find that the adoption speed of NPIs is associated with lower infections and is unrelated to non-COVID deaths, suggesting these measures slowed contagion. Finally, NPI adoption speed appears to have been less effective in Republican counties, suggesting that political ideology might have compromised their efficacy., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

U.S. President Trump's administration has vowed to boost immigration enforcement to get rid of "bad hombres," or undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Using past data on the alleged detention motives for a representative sample of Mexican deportees, we evaluate how prior widespread and prioritized enforcement has fared in that regard. We find that while the early sweeping approach to enforcement raised deportees' propensity of being detained for minor offenses, the trend reversed with prioritized enforcement. These findings inform policy tactics that, aside from proving effective in prioritizing serious criminal offenses, can also lead to significant savings to taxpayers.

Objectives: We examined differences in, and factors associated with, access to health services among Mexican im/migrants to the U.S. across migration phases, including pre-departure, destination, interception, and return., Methods: Using data from a cross-sectional survey conducted in Tijuana, Mexico (N = 1,541), we computed descriptive statistics and staged logistic regressions to estimate health care access indicators and factors associated with access to services., Results: Im/migrants at post-migration phases had lower likelihood of receiving health care and having a usual source of care, and higher rates of forgone care, than their counterparts at pre-departure. These differences were partly explained by length of migration phase, health insurance status, transportation barriers, and detention or imprisonment., Conclusions: Mexican im/migrants face challenges in accessing health services across the migration continuum, especially at post-migration phases. Binational efforts to provide affordable insurance coverage and reduce transportation limitations and incarceration could contribute to improving health care access among Mexican im/migrants.