Although a sizable fraction of the Puerto Rican-born population moved to the United States, the island also received large inflows of persons born outside Puerto Rico. Hence Puerto Rico provides a unique setting for examining how labor inflows and outflows coexist, and measuring the mirror-image...

This paper investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the United States are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits. Income-maximizing behavior implies that foreign-born welfare recipients unlike their native-born counterparts, may be...

This paper analyzes the determinants of homeownership in immigrant households over the 1980-2000 period. The study finds that immigrants have lower homeownership rates than natives and that the homeownership gap widened significantly during that period. The differential location decisions of...

There exist sizeable differences in the incidence and duration of welfare spells across ethnic groups, and these differences tend to persist across generations. Using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find that children raised in welfare households are themselves more likely to...

This paper uses data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the Current Population Surveys to document the differential shifts that occurred in the wage structures of the public and privatesectors between 1960 and 2000. The wage gap between the typical public sector worker and a comparable private...

The ultimate impact of immigration on the United States obviously depends not only on the economic, social, political, and cultural shifts that take place during the life cycle of the immigrant population, but also on the adjustment process experienced by the immigrant household across...

Our paper uses the wealth of information available in the NLS to expand on previous work in several ways. First, we investigate whether there is a meaningful distinction among types of job separations. Traditional analysis has categorized job separations as either employee-initiated (quits) or...

This paper analyzes the intergenerational mobility of immigrants. Using the 1940-1970 Censuses, the study reveals an important link between the earnings of immigrants and the earnings of their American-born children. Although there is some regression towards the mean, the earnings of...

Over 12 million persons migrated to Canada or the United States between 1959 and 1981. Beginning in the mid?1960s, the immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge considerably: the United States stressing family reunification and Canada stressing skills. This paper shows that the...

The socioeconomic performance of today's workers depends not only on parental skills, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parent's generation (or ethnic capital). This paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods. The evidence...