The belief that immigrants generate beneficial externalities in their host countries, specifically in the form of an increased opportunity and ability of firms to expand their foreign trade, has recently been challenged by George Borjas in Heaven?s Door (1999, p. 97) as having no empirical...

The main findings of this paper are that despite the existence of various affirmative action programs designed to improve the position of women and minorities in public construction, little has changed in the last twenty five years. We present evidence showing that where race conscious...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

Whether siblings of specific birth order perform differently has been a longstanding open empirical question. We use the family tree structure of the PSID to examine two claims found in the literature: whether being early in the birth order implies a distinct educational advantage, and whether...

Despite a longstanding belief that education importantly affects the process of immigrant assimilation, little is known about the relative importance of different mechanisms linking these two processes. This paper explores this issue through an examination of the effects of human capital on one...

We investigate the sources of differences in school performance between students of different races by focusing on identity issues. We find that having a higher percentage of same-race friends has a positive effect of white teenagers' test score while having a negative effect on blacks' test...

This paper analyses the compensatory behavior of smokers. Exploiting data on cotinine concentration a metabolite of nicotine measured in a large population of smokers over time, we show that smokers compensate tax hikes by extracting more nicotine per cigarette. Our study makes two important...

We study the effects of minimum wages and the EITC in the post-welfare reform era. For the minimum wage, the evidence points to disemployment effects that are concentrated among young minority men. For young women, there is little evidence that minimum wages reduce employment, with the exception...

Many studies have explored the determinants of entering into entrepreneurship and the differences in self-employment rates across racial and ethnic groups. However, very little is known about the survival in entrepreneurship of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants. Employing data from...

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration, there is no systematic empirical evidence on this issue. To motivate our analysis, we develop a simple theoretical model where migration policy is the result of the interaction between organized groups...