This article was presented at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April 2005, "Urban Dynamics in New York City." The goal of the conference was threefold: to examine the historical transformations of the engine-of-growth industries in New York and distill the main...

This paper examines the extent to which welfare programs reduce the probability that vulnerable household are food insecure, where food insecurity occurs when the household experiences food deprivation because of financial resource constraints. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity...

Abstract. Public education is one of the largest components of the public sectorin Colombia, in term of its size, share of public expenditures, and geographic coverage. In 1997, Colombia had 85 thousand educational establishments, 390 thousand teachers, and 8.6 million students. In addition,...

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...

The growth of the welfare state in the past few decades coincided with the resurgence of large-scale immigration to the United States, adding a new and explosive question to the already contentious debate over immigration policy: Do immigrants "pay their way" in the welfare state? The available...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of earnings differentials among male Hispanic immigrants in the United States. The principal finding of the study is that there are major differences in the rate of economic mobility of the various Hispanic groups. In particular, the rate of economic...

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the effect of union membership on job satisfaction and wages, and shows how the interaction between these effects leads to empirically observable relations between unionization and individual quit probabilities. Using the National...

During the last 25 years, annual hours worked by prime aged men fell by the equivalent of six 40-hour workweeks. The reduction was more pronounced among those younger than among mid-age workers, among black men than among white men, and among those with ...

The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skilled black men, fell precipitously between 1960 and 2000. At the same time, their incarceration rate rose. This paper examines the relation between immigration and these trends in employment and incarceration. Using data from the...