Mexican immigrants were historically clustered in a few cities, mainly in California and Texas. During the past 15 years, however, arrivals from Mexico established sizeable immigrant communities in many "new" cities. We explore the causes and consequences of the widening geographic diffusion of...

Mexican immigrants were historically clustered in a few cities, mainly in California and Texas. During the past 15 years, however, arrivals from Mexico established sizeable immigrant communities in many "new" cities. We explore the causes and consequences of the widening geographic diffusion of...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings. I focus on four areas of work: theoretical and econometric advances in modelling the causal effect of education in the presence of heterogeneous returns to schooling; recent studies that use...

In recent years, more than 1 million people a year have immigrated to the U.S., a level not seen since before the Great Depression. This boom is most apparent in the urban areas where immigrants tend to cluster. Given their numbers, these newly arrived residents must have some effect on local...

Brown v. Board of Education had little immediate effect on the dual system of education in the South; by the early 1970s, however, Southern schools were the most racially integrated in the country. This paper uses newly assembled and uniquely comprehensive data to document how different types of...

Using detailed plant- level data from the 1988 and 1993 Surveys of Manufacturing Technology, this paper examines the impact of skill mix in U.S. local labor markets on the use and adoption of automation technologies in manufacturing. The level of automation differs widely across U.S....

According to several measures, the difference in wages between men and women, the so-called "male-female wage gap" (MFWG), has shrunk substantially--by about half--over the past several decades. This phenomenon has been the subject of much research, speculation, and contention. For example, some...

The introduction and diffusion of personal computers are widely viewed as a technological revolution. Using U.S. metropolitan area–level panel data, this paper asks whether links between PC adoption, educational attainment, and the return to skill conform to a model of technological...

Over the past thirty years, U.S. manufacturing plants invested heavily in automation machinery. This paper shows these investments substituted for the least-skilled workers and complemented middle-skilled workers at equipment and fabricated metal plants. Specifically, it exploits the fact that...