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Ethnic groups tend to agglomerate and assemble, mostly in urban areas. While ethnic clustering is critically debated in societies and the consequences for economic outcomes are under debate in research, the process is not yet well understood. A separate literature has also examined the cultural and ethnic identity of immigrants and how these affect their economic performance and societal integration. However, an unexplored channel connects ethnic clustering with ethnic identity formation. Therefore this paper examines the role of ethnic geographic clustering in the sociocultural integration of immigrants. It employs survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, combined with disaggregated information at a low geographical level from the unexploited German full census of 1970 and 1987. We employ the exogenous placement of immigrants during their recruitment in the 1960s and 1970s and find that local co-ethnic concentration affects immigrants' cultural integration. Residential ethnic clustering strengthens immigrants' retention of an affiliation with their respective country of origin and weakens identification with the host society. The effects are nonlinear and only become significant at relatively high levels of co-ethnic concentration for the minority identity and at very low levels of local concentration for the majority identity. Our findings are robust to the use of an instrumental variable approach.

Pre-College human capital investment occurs within a competitive environment and depends on market incentives created by Affirmative Action (AA) in college admissions. These policies affect mechanisms for rank-order allocation of college seats, and alter the relative competition between blacks and whites. We present a theory of AA in university admissions, showing how the effects of AA on human capital investment differ by student ability and demographic group. We then conduct a field experiment designed to mimic important aspects of competitive investment prior to the college market. We pay students based on relative performance on a mathematics exam in order to test the incentive effects of AA, and track study efforts on an online mathematics website. Consistent with theory, AA increases average human capital investment and exam performance for the majority of disadvantaged students targeted by the policy, by mitigating so-called "discouragement effects." The experimental evidence suggests that AA can promote greater equality of market outcomes and narrow achievement gaps at the same time.

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with socioeconomic, ethnic, or cultural differences, may limit the scope of cooperation between individuals. A central question, then, is how to overcome such obstacles to cooperation. We study this question in the context of Germany, by asking whether the propensity of immigrant youth to cooperate with native peers was affected by a major integration reform: the introduction of birthright citizenship. Our unique setup exploits data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment in a quasi-experimental evaluation framework. We find that the policy caused male, but not female, immigrants to significantly increase their cooperativeness toward natives. We show that the increase in out-group cooperation among immigrant boys is an outcome of more trust rather than a reflection of stronger other- regarding preferences towards natives. In exploring factors that may explain these behavioral effects, we present evidence that the policy also led to a near-closure of the educational achievement gap between young immigrant men and their native peers. Our results highlight that, through integration interventions, governments can modify prosocial behavior in a way that generates higher levels of efficiency in the interaction between social groups.

Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. Keywords: Mental health, hate crime, migration, refugees, human capital.

This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although a more accommodative monetary policy increases employment of black households more than white households, the overall effects are small. At the same time, an accommodative monetary policy shock exacerbates the wealth difference between black and white households, because black households own less financial assets that appreciate in value. Over multi-year time horizons, the employment effects are substantially smaller than the countervailing portfolio effects. We conclude that there is little reason to think that accommodative monetary policy plays a significant role in reducing racial inequities in the way often discussed. On the contrary, it may well accentuate inequalities for extended periods.

Many countries are experiencing increasing inflows of immigrant students. This raises concerns that having a large share of students for whom the host country language is not their first language may have detrimental effects on the educational outcomes of native children. However, the evidence is mixed, with some studies finding negative effects, and others finding no effects. Whether higher concentrations of immigrant students have an effect on native students differs across countries according to factors such as organization of the school system and immigrants’ socio-economic background.

This paper examines the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the demand for formal land tenure in urban Tanzania. Using a unique census of two highly-fractionalized unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, I show that households located near coethnics are significantly less likely to purchase a limited form of land tenure recently offered by the government. I attempt to address one of the chief concerns - endogenous sorting of households - by conditioning on a household’s choice of coethnics neighbors upon arrival in the neighborhood. I also find that coethnic residence predicts lower levels of perceived expropriation risk, but not perceived access to credit nor contribution to local public goods. These results suggest that close-knit ethnic groups may be less likely to accept state-provided goods due to their ability to generate reasonable substitutes, in this case protection from expropriation. The results are robust to different definitions of coethnicity and spatial cut-offs, controls for family ties and religious similarity as well as spatial fixed effects. Finally, the main result is confirmed using a large-scale administrative data-set covering over 20,000 land parcels in the city, exploiting ethnically-unique last names to predict tribal affiliation.

This paper studies discrimination in financial markets in the context of the “Dreyfus Affair” in 19th century France. We analyze the market performance of firms with Jewish board members during this historical episode. Building on empirical evidence and a model with antisemitic and unbiased agents, we show how investors betting on firms with Jewish connections earned higher returns during the media campaign organized to rehabilitate Dreyfus, the unfairly accused Jewish officer at the center of the Affair. Our paper provides novel evidence that discrimination can affect stock prices and create rents for some market participants. While these rents may attract betting against discriminators, the uncertainty surrounding discriminatory beliefs can limit the extent of arbitrage and allow discrimination to survive in the long run.

Why do legal permanent migrants return to their home countries? How do home country conditions influence this decision? This paper uses exogenous home country exchange rate shocks arising from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to distinguish return motivations of a national sample of Australian immigrants. On average, a 10% favorable exchange rate shock (a depreciation in the home country currency) leads to a reduced likelihood of return of 0.37 percentage points for migrants. The effect is found to be stronger for those who had pre-existing intentions to return, weaker for those undecided, and zero for those who initially stated their desire to stay. These results favor a life-cycle explanation for migrant behavior and reject the theory that migrants are target earners who seek to invest upon return home.

Past research has shown that Hispanic students make test score gains relative to whites as they age through school; however, this finding stands in contrast to the experience of blacks, who show little change in their relative position over the same time frame. Distinguishing Hispanic students by immigrant generation, I find that the children of immigrants (first- and second-generation Hispanics) drive the improvement in Hispanic test scores. Later-generation Hispanics consistently perform slightly below whites, perhaps due to negative selection into ethnic identification. Thus, previous estimates vastly understate the progress of first- and second-generation Hispanic immigrants. From a negative gap in 3rd grade, these students surpass socioeconomically similar whites in math and reading by middle school and end 8th grade as much as a quarter of a standard deviation ahead. Assimilation alone cannot explain this progress; a potential explanation is that immigrant parents create a home environment that fosters achievement.

We explain persistent differences in cultural traits of immigrant groups with the presence of community leaders. Leaders influence the cultural traits of their community, which have an impact on the group's earnings. They determine whether a community will be more assimilated and wealthier or less assimilated and poorer. With a leader cultural integration remains incomplete. The leader chooses more distinctive cultural traits in high productivity environments and if the community is more connected. Lump sum transfers to immigrants can hinder cultural integration. These findings are in line with integration patterns of various ethnic and religious groups.

We evaluate the empirical effectiveness of de facto versus de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Using previously-unexploited racially-disaggregated data on voter registration in Mississippi for the years 1896 and 1899, we show that the observed pattern of black political participation is driven by de facto disfranchisement as captured by the presence of a black political majority, which negatively affects black registration. The de jure provisions introduced with the 1890 state constitution and involving literacy tests and poll taxes exert a non-robust impact. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences approach shows that the decline in aggregate turnout pre-dates the introduction of de jure restrictions and confirms a causal effect of the presence of a black political majority. De jure restrictions intensify the influence of the latter after 1890, which suggests that the main effect of the constitutional reforms may have been an institutionalization of de facto disfranchisement.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 3 million people with German ancestors immigrated to Germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship. Exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic German immigrants by German authorities across regions upon arrival, we find that immigration significantly increases crime. The crime impact of immigration depends strongly on local labor market conditions, with strong impacts in regions with high unemployment. Similarly, we find substantially stronger effects in regions with high preexisting crime levels or large shares of foreigners.

This paper examines how a single female's investment in healthy body weight is affected by the quality of single males in her marriage market. A principle concern in estimation is the presence of market-level unobserved heterogeneity that may be correlated with changes in single male quality, measured as earning potential. To address this concern, we employ a differencing strategy that normalizes the exercise behaviors of single women to those of their married counterparts. Our main results suggest that when potential mate quality in a marriage market decreases, single black women invest less in healthy body weight. For example, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of low quality single black males leads to a 5–10% decrease in vigorous exercise taken by single black females. Results for single white women are qualitatively similar, but not consistent across specifications. These results highlight the relationship between male and female human capital acquisition that is driven by participation in the marriage market. Our results suggest that programs designed to improve the economic prospects of single males may yield positive externalities in the form of improved health behaviors, such as more exercise, particularly for single black females.

Reflecting upon recent enforcement policy activism of US states and countries within the EU towards unauthorized workers, we examine the overlap of centralized (federal) and decentralized (state or regional) enforcement of immigration policies in a spatial context. Among other results, we find that if interstate mobility is costless, internal enforcement is overprovided, and border enforcement and local goods are underprovided when regions take more responsibility in deciding policies. This leads to higher levels of unauthorized immigration under decentralization. Interregional migration costs moderate such over/underprovision. Moreover, income distributive motives in the host country may shape the design of immigration policies in specific ways. The basic model is extended in several ways. First, we study how the policies change when regions can exclude unauthorized immigrants from the consuming of regionally provided goods or services. Second, we assume that the potential number of unauthorized immigrants is endogenous. And finally, we examine the effect of considering an alternative spatial configuration that includes border and “interior” regions.

Este trabajo estudia las disparidades salariales por raza en Brasil durante el período 1980-2010. Utilizando microdatos de censos brasileros, se encuentra que la mayor parte de la brecha observada entre el ingreso de un blanco y un afrodescendiente se debe a diferencias en características productivas, siendo el nivel educativo el mayor determinante. A pesar de ello, entre 20 y 30 por ciento de la diferencia de ingresos promedio observada no es explicada por ningún atributo determinante de la productividad, y esta porción es creciente en el tiempo. Asimismo, el análisis de la brecha salarial para distintos cuantiles de la distribución del ingreso, revela que el componente no explicado tiende a desaparecer en la cola inferior de la distribución de ingresos, y se acrecienta en la cola superior, evidenciando un posible techo de cristal para los afrodescendientes., Facultad de Ciencias Económicas

International audience; In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in the United States over the past decades. Two distinct instrumentation strategies suggest that this correlation (partly) reflects a causality from innovativeness to top income inequality, and the effect is significant: for example, when measured by the number of patent per capita, innovativeness accounts on average across US states for around 17% of the total increase in the top 1% income share between 1975 and 2010. Yet, innovation does not appear to increase other measures of inequality which do not focus on top incomes. Next, we show that the positive effects of innovation on the top 1% income share are dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Finally, from cross-section regressions performed at the commuting zone (CZ) level, we find that: (i) innovativeness is positively correlated with upward social mobility; (ii) the positive correlation between innovativeness and social mobility, is driven mainly by entrant innovators and less so by incumbent innovators, and it is dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Overall, our findings vindicate the Schumpeterian view whereby the rise in top income shares is partly related to innovation-led growth, where innovation itself fosters social mobility at the top through creative destruction.

Using Norwegian register data on all individuals born 1985 to 2000 who were either nativeborn or who immigrated as children or teens (N=1,013,734), the current study investigated timing of first co-residential union and choice of union type in the period 2005 through 2018. Descriptive results showed that 64% of the second generation (Norwegian-born children of immigrants) and 75% of the 1.5 generation (immigrated prior to age 18) chose cohabitation as first union, compared with 94% of those without a migration background. Results from competing risk event history models confirmed that second-generation immigrants, and particularly women, were more likely to marry directly and less likely to cohabit than those belonging to the 1.5 generation and Norwegians without a migration background. Secondgeneration individuals originating from Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Kosovo, Sri-Lanka, and India were more prone to marry directly than the native-born children of immigrants from other non-Western countries. Conversely, second-generation Iranians were less likely to marry, whereas those originating from Vietnam and Bosnia and Herzegovina were most likely to cohabit. The chance of marrying directly decreased across the study period among immigrant-background and majority individuals alike. Selv om Norge er en relativt ny innvandringsdestinasjon, står et betydelig antall unge med innvandrerbakgrunn nå på terskelen til voksenlivet. Familie -og samlivsatferd er viktige indikatorer på sosioøkonomisk integrasjon. Valg av partner har blitt ansett som særlig viktig, men også valg av samlivstype og når i livet man etablerer seg med en partner for første gang, kan gi en pekepinn på i hvor stor grad personer med innvandrerbakgrunn følger det rådende familieetableringsmønsteret og nye familienormer. Første samlivsetablering er en sentral livsløpsovergang med konsekvenser for videre demografiske hendelser som fruktbarhet og samlivsbrudd. Tidspunktet for første samlivsinngåelse kan også ha ringvirkninger for utdanningsløpet og senere arbeidsmarkedsdeltakelse. Få studier har undersøkt familie -og samlivsatferden til norskfødte barn av innvandrere. Både i Norge og resten av Europa er dette en befolkningsgruppe som inntil nylig har vært for ung til at denne typen analyser har vært mulig. Jeg bruker registerdata over alle personer født i Norge i perioden 1985 til og med 2000, samt personer født i samme periode som innvandret til Norge før de fylte 18 år, og undersøker tidspunkt for etablering av det første samlivet samt valg av samlivstype (samboerskap eller ekteskap) fra 2005 til og med 2018. Jeg er særlig interessert i barn av innvandrere født i Norge av innvandrerforeldre, da deres atferd kan gi en pekepinn på endringer i innvandrerbefolkningens integrering i det norske samfunnet over tid. Resultatene viser at samboerskap er den foretrukne første samlivstypen for de aller fleste, men samboerskap er aller vanligst blant dem uten innvandrerbakgrunn. Hele 94 % av personer uten innvandrerbakgrunn valgte samboerskap framfor ekteskap, mens tilsvarende andeler for norskfødte med innvandrerforeldre og tidliginnvandrere var henholdsvis 64 % og 75 %. Resultater fra multivariate forløpsmodeller bekreftet at norskfødte med innvandrerforeldre, og særlig kvinner, var mest tilbøyelige til å gifte seg direkte og minst tilbøyelige til å velge samboerskap, etterfulgt av tidliginnvandrere. Det var imidlertid betydelige variasjoner etter opprinnelsesregioner -og land. Separate analyser av norskfødte med innvandrerforeldre viste at de med bakgrunn fra Tyrkia, Pakistan, Marokko, Kosovo, Sri-Lanka og India oftere valgte å gifte seg og sjeldnere valgte samboerskap enn de med innvandrerforeldre fra øvrige «ikke-vestlige» land (land i Asia, Afrika, Latin-Amerika, Oseania unntatt Australia og New Zealand, og Europa utenom EU28/EØS). Norskfødte med innvandrerforeldre fra Iran var mindre tilbøyelige til å gifte seg, mens de med bakgrunn fra Vietnam og Bosnia og Herzegovina hadde høyere sjanse for å bli samboere, sammenliknet med norskfødte med bakgrunn fra Asia, Afrika etc. Sjansen for å gifte seg direkte sank i løpet av observasjonsperioden (2005-2018) blant alle grupper. Research Council of Norway (Grant #250486)

While the share of non-native students in a class is supposed to have a non positive effect on school achievement, little is said about the heterogeneity of the ethnic minority make-up. Ethnic diversity can stimulate the creativity of students, can push them to be proficient in the instructional language, can reduce the scope of ethnic identification with all its possible drawbacks, but it may also worsen social interactions among pupils and make the job of teachers more difficult. I exploit the within school cohort variation in ethnic diversity of a rich data-set about primary education in the Netherlands to investigate whether ethnic diversity matters for school achievement, for whom it matters and which can be the mechanisms it may generate. I find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the test scores of minority students, in particular for language skills. I also find some evidence of a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and school social interaction among pupils.

Selling internationally requires products that resonate with an international customer base and therefore an approach to markets that is in keeping with diverse cultures (i.e., relational capital). As emphasized by international business studies, this relational capital is in turn related to the successful teaming of a diverse workforce, as this process teaches employees to operate in multicultural environments. This knowledge becomes like an intangible asset to which firms can resort, also when engaging in international transactions. We explore this channel empirically, investigating the impact of workforce diversity on firms' exporting performances and find that ethnic diversity further justifies firms' different presence in international markets. Since hiring is not a random practice, and firms ultimately select into ethnically different labor forces, we exploit the EU enlargement of 2004 to instrument for the diversity of the pool of workers locally recruitable. Because migrants tend to settle where the attitude toward them is most favorable, we use the median voter's political ideology at firm's location to measure the hostility at time of settlement. This gives our instrument spatial variation besides time variation.

Immigration to democratic nations generates new groups of potential voters. This paper investigates how the electorate share of immigrant groups influences their likelihood of becoming politically mobilized, focusing on the mechanism of coalition formation with the Democratic Party. Using newly assembled data on ethnic enclaves in American cities at the start of the twentieth century, I show immigrants were more likely to mobilize politically as their share of the local electorate grew larger. This effect is driven by political mobilization in voting districts where the Democratic Party likely needed an immigrant group’s vote to win elections. I also consider the shape of the electorate share effect, showing it is nonlinear and consistent with a political economy model of coalition formation.

We study whether early tracking of students based on ability increases migrant-native achievement gaps. To eliminate confounding impacts of unobserved country traits, we employ a differences-in-differences strategy that exploits international variation in the age of tracking as well as student achievement before and after potential tracking. Based on pooled data from 12 large-scale international student assessments, we show that cross-sectional estimates are likely to be downward-biased. Our differences-in-differences estimates suggest that early tracking does not significantly affect overall migrant-native achievement gaps, but we find evidence for a detrimental impact for less integrated migrants.

We document the educational integration of immigrant children in France and Germany with a focus on the link between family size and educational decisions and distinguishing particularly between first- and second-generation immigrants and between source country groups. First, for immigrant adolescents, we show family-size adjusted convergence to almost native levels of higher education track attendance from the first to the second generation of immigrants. Second, we find that reduced fertility is associated with higher educational outcomes for immigrant children, possibly through a quantity-quality trade-off. Third, we show that between one third and the complete difference in family-size adjusted educational outcomes between immigrants from different source countries or immigrant generations can be explained by parental background. This latter holds true for various immigrant groups in both France and Germany, two major European economies with distinct immigration histories.

Despite the large increases in economic inequality since 1970, American survey respondents exhibit no increase in support for redistribution, contrary to the predictions from standard theories of redistributive preferences. We replicate these results but further demonstrate substantial heterogeneity by demographic group. In particular, the two groups that have most moved against income redistribution are the elderly and African Americans. We find little evidence that these subgroup trends are explained by relative economic gains or growing cultural conservatism, two common explanations. We further show that the trend among the elderly is uniquely American, at least relative to other developed countries with comparable survey data. While we are unable to provide definitive evidence on the cause of these two groups’ declining redistributive support, we provide additional correlations that may offer fruitful directions for future research on the topic. One story consistent with the data on elderly trends is that older Americans worry that redistribution will come at their expense, in particular through cuts to Medicare. We find that the elderly have grown increasingly opposed to government provision of health insurance and that controlling for this tendency explains about 40 percent of their declining support for redistribution. For blacks, controlling for their declining support for race-targeted aid explains nearly 45 percent of their differential decline in redistributive preferences, which raises a further question: Why has support for race-targeted aid fallen during a period when black economic catch-up to whites has stalled?

This paper addresses the relationship between child access to and use of health services, perceived health, and parental nativity. Parental region of birth is identified to include the underlying cultural differences across immigrant groups. We found that children of immigrant families, regardless of their immigration status, have lower odds to visit the doctor at least once a year and lack of usual place of care. Conversely, this group has better outcomes with regard to their perceived health. Results hold when parental region of birth is included. Overall, non-citizen children of Latino American, Asian and African families have the worse outcomes.

The family life courses of immigrants and their descendants, particularly intermarriage and the timing of marriage and childbearing, have been widely studied as indicators of societal integration. But largely absent are investigations into the role of cohabitation in the family lives of these subpopulations. Choosing cohabitation as first union may, for instance, signal secularization and less social control. Using Norwegian register data on all first co-residential unions entered 2006-2015 among individuals born 1980 or later (N=218,833 unions, 80.5% cohabitations), we consider associations between partner choice and subsequent partnership transitions. Around half of first unions including second-generation individuals were cohabitations, among which 88% were exogamous (i.e., partners originating from different countries or with a majority partner). These exogamous cohabiting couples were more dissolution-prone and less likely to marry than endogamous immigrant and second-generation cohabiting couples. Among second-generation couples who married directly, on the other hand, 79% were endogamous. These marriages were less likely to divorce than their first-generation counterparts. Research Council of Norway (Grant #250486) Swedish Research Council (Grant #2014-1668)

Pooled international survey data is used to analyze occupational segregation in times of the great recession. Observing over 30 European economies and the United States over a time span of 10 years, I present evidence of a somehow surprising crisis effect on gender-based segregation. While all economies differ in their general magnitudes, the economic downturn affects a temporary reduction of segregation in terms of two dissimilarity measures.

A controversial issue in the US is how to reduce the number of illegal immigrants and what effect this would have on the US economy. To answer this question we set up a two-country model with search in labor markets and featuring legal and illegal immigrants among the low skilled. We calibrate it to the US and Mexican economies during the 2000-2010 period. As immigrants - especially illegal ones - have a worse outside option than natives, their wages are lower. Hence, their presence reduces the labor cost of employers who, as a consequence, create more jobs per unemployed when there are more immigrants. Because of such effects our model shows increasing deportation rates and tightening border control weakens low-skilled labor markets, increasing unemployment of native low-skilled workers. Legalization, instead, decreases the unemployment rate of low-skilled natives and increases income per native. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. 18 792 821 792-821

We investigate second-generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. In particular, if migrant and native children shared the same socioeconomic family background, would we still observe differences in education outcomes? Applying linear and matching decomposition methods to carefully account for differences in background characteristics, we find no disparities in recommendations for and actual enrollment at secondary school types between migrant children and comparable native peers. Also, the native-migrant education gap at the age of 17 years can be entirely explained by differences in socioeconomic family background. We thus conclude that comparable natives face similar difficulties as migrant children in the German education system. There are more general inequalities in secondary schooling that are not migrant specific, but related to socioeconomic family background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the intersection of the cooperative movement and Indigenous communities in Canada. The paper brings a lens of nation and race to an analysis of the cooperative movement in Canada, a perspective that has received limited attention in published literature. Cooperatives have had a dual role in Indigenous communities. The history of Indigenous cooperative development in Canada is inseparable from historical government colonization policies. In the current context, cooperatives have been utilized by Indigenous communities as a tool for economic and social development. Indigenous cooperatives demonstrate innovative combinations of “quadruple bottom line” business approaches, including financial, social, environmental and cultural goals. The extraordinary growth of Indigenous cooperatives in Canada, particularly in Inuit communities in the North, has also been supported by government policy implementation including financial and technical management support. A pan-Arctic comparison of government policies affecting development of cooperatives is provided as counter examples against the hypothesis of “cultural fit” between cooperatives and Indigenous communities. Ultimately, cooperatives are explained as an organizational form that can be co-opted for colonization or decolonization, capitalism or socialism, settler or Indigenous communities for their own specific purposes.

We use sibling variation in age at migration to study how early life exposure to the host country affects social integration in adulthood. Building on a Swedish population-wide dataset, we show that early experiences affect the probability of living close to, working with, and marrying other immigrants. Segregation also decreases with parental time in the host country before the subject’s birth. The effects are permanent and do not arise through differences in education or economic outcomes. Several results instead suggest that social integration is heavily affected by preferences or cultural identities that are set during early, formative, years.

Author(s): Lleras-Muney, Adriana; Shertzer, Allison | Abstract: We provide the first estimates of the effect of statutes requiring English as the language of instruction and compulsory schooling laws on the school enrollment, work, literacy, and English fluency of immigrant children during the Americanization period (1910-1930). English-only statutes moderately increased the literacy of certain foreign-born children, particularly those living in cities or whose parents were not fluent in English. However, these laws had no impact on immigrants' eventual labor market outcomes or measures of social integration (from 1940 census and WWII enlistment records). Only laws regulating the age when children could work significantly affected immigrant outcomes. (JEL I21, I26, I28, J13, J15, N31, N32)

Using Italian data on language standardized tests for different levels of schooling we investigate 1) if the observed gap in educational attainments in first generation immigrants tends to lower the longer their stay in Italy and 2) if younger children reduce the gap faster than their older schoolmates. Results confirm the presence of a significant gap between natives and immigrants students in school outcomes for all grades, with first generation immigrants showing the largest gap. Further, comparing the results between first and second generation immigrant students suggests that the significant gap observed in the first generation is mainly due to the negative performance of immigrant children newly arrived in Italy. That is, for first generation students, closing the gap with second generation ones seems to be, for the most part, a matter of time. At the same time, the gap between natives and second generation immigrants remains significant in all grades. Finally, when we compare the results across the different years, it turns out that interventions at younger ages are likely to be more effective.

Nearly half of U.S. employers test job applicants and workers for drugs. A common assumption is that the rise of drug testing must have had negative consequences for black employment. However, the rise of employer drug testing may have benefited African-Americans by enabling non-using blacks to prove their status to employers. I use variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation to identify the impacts of testing on black hiring. Black employment in the testing sector is suppressed in the absence of testing, a finding which is consistent with ex ante discrimination on the basis of drug use perceptions. Adoption of pro-testing legislation increases black employment in the testing sector by 7-30% and relative wages by 1.4-13.0%, with the largest shifts among low skilled black men. Results further suggest that employers substitute white women for blacks in the absence of testing.

Proficiency in the language spoken by the majority population may be crucial for the cognitive development of children from immigrant families. High-quality child care is believed to promote such language skills, and it is thus of concern that children from immigrant families are underrepresented in formal child care across OECD countries. How can we increase their participation, and can such participation improve family integration? We study an intervention in some districts of Oslo where children aged four and five were eligible for twenty hours of free childcare weekly. Taking advantage of the intervention being available in some city districts and not in others, we estimate the effect of the intervention on the enrollment of children and on their parents' employment and education, using outcomes measured for the same family before and after the child's age of eligibility. We find that the intervention increased the participation for children from immigrant families by 15 percent. However, we do not find support for effects on parental employment or education. The performance in tests at school entry (age six) for children from immigrant families in city districts with free child care is better than that of similar children in comparison districts. Overall, our results suggest that subsidizing center based child care can improve the cognitive development of children from immigrant families.

The U.S. health-care sector is large and growing—health-care spending in 2011 amounted to $2.7 trillion and 18 percent of GDP. Approximately half of health-care output is allocated via markets. In this paper, we analyze the industrial organization literature on health-care markets, focusing on the impact of competition on price, quality, and treatment decisions for health-care providers and health insurers. We conclude with a discussion of research opportunities for industrial organization economists, including opportunities created by the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (JEL J15, J24, J71, J81, K31)

This paper investigates both commune and household determinants of household income among ethnic minorities in the North-West Mountains – the poorest region of Vietnam. The findings show that the vast majority of the sample households heavily depend on agricultural activities. Factors affecting household income per capita are examined using multiple regression models and the findings confirm the important role of education, non-farm employment and fixed assets in improving household income. In addition, some commune variables such as the presence of the means of transportation, post offices and non-farm job opportunities are found to have an increasing impact on household income. The findings suggest that policies for poverty reduction should aim at both commune and household levels. Policies that focus on improving the access of ethnic minorities to education and non-farm employment are expected to be effective ways of enhancing their income.

In the late 1970s, rates of undocumented immigration into the United States began to increase dramatically. Fearing negative labor market and social effects, Congress passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The primary purpose of the bill was to enhance the controls on the hiring of undocumented immigrants, making it illegal to hire or recruit undocumented immigrants. However, the legislation also represented a near-universal legalization of immigrants in the United States, a group comprising almost three million people, about 1 percent of the nation’s population. This paper examines the effects that the IRCA had on the commission of crime in the United States. I provide estimates of the total effect of this legalization, exploiting the large amount of variation in both the geographical distribution and the quasi-random timing of the legalizations. I find persistent decreases in crime of 3 percent to 5 percent, primarily driven by a drop in property crimes. This fall in crime is equivalent to 120,000 –180,000 fewer violent and property crimes committed each year across the nation due to legalization. Moreover, the declines in crime cannot be explained by existing trends, economic conditions, declines in drug crimes, changes to police forces and prison populations, or other common explanations of changes in crime rates during this period.

Immigration enforcement has ambiguous implications for the crime rate of undocumented immigrants. On the one hand, expulsions reduce the pool of immigrants at risk of committing crimes, on the other they lower the opportunity cost of crime for those who are not expelled. We estimate the effect of expulsions on the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in Italy exploiting variation in enforcement toward immigrants of different nationality, due to the existence of bilateral agreements for the control of illegal migration. We find that stricter enforcement of migration policy reduces the crime rate of undocumented immigrants.

During the 1990s the Kagera region of Tanzania experienced a forced migration shock. A series of geographical barriers led to a higher concentration of forced migrants in some parts of the region relative to others, resulting in a natural experiment. Using panel data (pre and post forced migration shock), we find that greater exposure to the refugee shock resulted in Tanzanians having a lower likelihood of working outside the household as employees. However, employees more affected by the shock had a higher probability of being in professional occupations and being part of a pensions program.

The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a rising return to non-routine cognitive skills and a greater wage return to university education. Controlling for education, we find a pronounced cross-arrival cohort decline in earnings that coincided with cross-cohort declines in cognitive occupational task requirements and cross-cohort increases in manual occupational task requirements. The immigrant earnings outcomes had only a small effect on overall Canadian earnings inequality. Resume Changement technique, tâches occupationnelles, et resultats declinants pour les immigrants : Implications pour l’inegalite des gains et des revenus au Canada. Les auteurs analysent les gains et les prerequis des tâches occupationnelles des immigrants. Les niveaux d’education croissants des immigrants dans les annees 1990 n’ont pas entraine une grande amelioration dans les gains comme on aurait pu s’y attendre, si l’informatisation accrue et les changements techniques qui s’ensuivent ont entraine un rendement croissant sur des habiletes cognitives non-routinieres et un rendement salarial plus grand sur l’education universitaire. Normalisant pour le niveau d’education, on decouvre un declin entre cohortes dans les gains qui coincide avec un declin dans ce que reclament les tâches en termes d’habiletes cognitives, et un accroissement de ce que reclament les occupations manuelles. L’effet de ces changements sur les gains des immigrants n’a eu qu’un faible impact sur l’inegalite des gains au Canada.

We evaluate how intensified interior immigration enforcement impacts the likelihood that children of unauthorized immigrants will repeat a grade or drop out of school. Using a weighted index of the intensity of interior immigration enforcement at the MSA level, we find that increased enforcement has the largest impact on younger children ages 6 to 13. The estimates, which account for the non-random residential location of children and their families, reveal that increased enforcement raises young children's probability of repeating a grade by 6 percent and their likelihood of dropping out of school by 25.2 percent.

By the 2008/09 school year the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) abolished binding school catchment areas in all municipalities. The reform has been controversial and it was feared that school choice would increase ethnic segregation. Using data on all primary schools we contribute to this debate by analyzing ethnic segregation before and after the reform. We discuss drawbacks of commonly used segregation indices and their interpretation as well as causality issues. Although there is an increase in segregation over the time period studied, our results show that segregation has not been affected by the policy reform.

Using a new database that matches patent applications by Swedish residents with demographic information from 1985 to 2007, we examine differences in inventive performance by individuals of foreign and domestic origins, in terms of quantity (probability of patenting, total number of patents per inventor) and quality (forward citations, probability of grant) of patents. We further compare adult and child immigrants with their Swedish-born counterparts. Holding other variables constant, we find that the immigrants are generally less likely to patent than the Swedish-born. Nonetheless, the general group of immigrant inventors, including those who migrated as adults, performs as well as the native inventors and therefore seems more positively selected. Compared with the Swedish-born, the immigrants who migrated as children are disadvantaged in both quantity and quality of patents, which may be linked to a lack of Sweden-specific human capital. Whether education was received in Sweden does not seem to make a difference for the immigrants who migrated as adults. In summary, this study provides an initial impression of the inventive performance, contribution and challenges of distinct groups of immigrants who have differing characteristics and backgrounds.

V súčasnom období iba niekoľko tém podnietilo takú odozvu vo verejnej diskusii a oficiálnych činoch ako medzinárodná migrácia. Intenzívny výskum sa vykonáva najmä v oblasti sociálnych, ekonomických a politických vplyvov imigrácie do hostiteľských krajín. Cieľom tohto článku je prispieť k smerovaniu tohto výskumu a analyzovať percepciu migračných tendencií vo francúzskej spoločnosti. Obsah štúdie zahŕňa analýzu imigrantov z afrického priestoru, najmä Alžírska a Maroka, ktorí majú najväčšie zastúpenie medzi imigrantmi vo Francúzsku. (Few subjects in recent decades have aroused more public debate and official action than international migration. Particularly intensive research has been carried out in the fields of social, economic, and political impacts of immigration on host countries. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this stream of research and analyze the perception of migration tendencies in the French society. The scope of the present study includes the analysis of immigrants from Africa, especially from Algeria and Morocco which constitute the largest share of immigrants in France.)

This paper explores how the quality of information available to voters in‡uences the choices they make in the polling booth and in turn aects the strategies of political parties competing for their support. To do so, the paper builds a model of redistributive politics under asymmetric information and then tests the resulting propositions with data from recent elections in Sierra Leone. Using the Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) model as a foundation, I incorporate a new determinant of voting choice— candidate quality— which is only imperfectly observed by voters. I show that voters with better information about candidates are more likely to cross ethnic party lines to support a high quality candidate. Furthermore, since information encourages voters to consider characteristics like candidate charisma that are di¢ cult for parties to observe, it makes party forecasting of expected vote shares more uncertain. Such electoral uncertainty in turn induces parties to spread their resources more evenly across jurisdictions. Two institutional attributes of the empirical setting— ethnicity-based politics and decentralization— enable direct tests of these informational propositions as well as a novel identi…cation strategy for the classic swing voter hypothesis. My results suggest that information could break the low accountability equilibrium in which citizens cast their votes blindly along partisan lines, creating little incentive for political parties to invest in candidate quality or provide resources to areas outside the most tightly contested jurisdictions.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), passed by the US Congress in 1988, was a watershed in the history of policymaking directed toward reservation-resident American Indians. IGRA set the stage for tribal government-owned gaming facilities. It also shaped how this new industry would develop and how tribal governments would invest gaming revenues. Since then, Indian gaming has approached commercial, state-licensed gaming in total revenues. Gaming operations have had a far-reaching and transformative effect on American Indian reservations and their economies. Specifically, Indian gaming has allowed marked improvements in several important dimensions of reservation life. For the first time, some tribal governments have moved to fiscal independence. Native nations have invested gaming revenues in their economies and societies, often with dramatic effect.

Using the Children of the Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), we examine the association between education at the intensive margin and twenty pecuniary and non-pecuniary adult outcomes among first- and second-generation American immigrant youth. Education at the intensive margin is measured by two widely used standardized math and reading test scores, national percentile rankings on these tests and cumulative grade point average (GPA) in both middle and high school. Our findings provide evidence that the academic achievement of immigrant children in early adolescence is an accurate predictor of later life outcomes. We also examine a novel hypothesis that relative academic performance of immigrant children in high school compared to middle school, which could be an indicator of change in adolescent aspirations and motivation as well as the degree of adaptation and assimilation to the host country, has an effect on their adult outcomes even after controlling for the levels of academic performance in middle and high school. The results suggest that an improvement in GPA from middle school to high school is associated with favorable adult outcomes. Several sensitivity tests confirm the robustness of main findings.

In his valuable contribution, After Civil Rights, John Skrentny shows that in many sectors of the labor market, race is used in ways that were unanticipated when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted. With separate chapters on the professions and business, the public sector, media and entertainment, and the low-skill market, he demonstrates that the new racial realism is widespread, generally has some justification from social scientific research, and is usually inconsistent with judicial decisions. I review the racially realistic practices (racial matching, increasing diversity, racial signaling, and racial characteristics) and discuss their implications for labor economics and for policy. (JEL J15, J24, J71, J81, K31)

In this paper, we examine the effects of economic cycles on low-to moderate-income families. We use variation across states and over time to estimate the effects of cycles on the distribution of income, using fine gradations of the household income-to-poverty ratio. We also explore how the effects of cycles affect the risk of falling into poverty across demographic groups, focusing on age, race/ethnicity, and family type. We conclude by testing to see whether these relationships have changed in the Great Recession. We discuss the results in light of the changes in the social safety net in recent decades.