One of the continuing areas of controversy surrounding higher education is affirmative action. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Fisher v. Texas, and their ruling may well influence universities' diversity initiatives, especially if they overturn Grutter v. Bollinger and rule that diversity...

Using Census and CPS data, we show that U.S.-born Mexican Americans who marry non-Mexicans are substantially more educated and English proficient, on average, than are Mexican Americans who marry co-ethnics (whether they be Mexican Americans or Mexican immigrants). In addition, the non-Mexican...

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized...

This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census of Population to examine the English language skills of natives and immigrants. The first main finding is that lack of fluency in spoken English is rare among native- born Americans. In 1990, 98.4 % of natives aged 18 to 64 reported to the...

In this study we examine the importance of assimilation and ethnic enclave residence for smoking outcomes among United States immigrants. We draw data on over 140,000 immigrants from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements between 1995 and 2011. Several patterns emerge from our...

Under the urging of late nineteenth-century humanitarian reformers, U.S. policy toward American Indians shifted from removal and relocation efforts to state-sponsored attempts to quot;civilizequot; Indians through allotment of tribal lands, citizenship, and forced education. There is little...

This paper analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations. I assume that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process. The skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic...

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...

Common culture and common language facilitate trade between people. Minorities have incentives to become assimilated and to learn the majority language so that they have a larger pool of potential trading partners. The value of assimilation is larger to someone from a small minority than to one...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...