The Unknown Immigration: Incentives and Family Composition in Inter-Country Adoptions to the United States

Children adopted from abroad are an immigrant group about which little is known. According to the U.S. Census more than one and a half million children living in the U.S. are adopted, with fifteen percent of them born abroad. In fact more than twenty thousand adopted orphans from abroad enter the country each year. The families who adopt these orphans are mostly white, wealthy, and well educated (Kossoudji, 2008). What are the characteristics of children who are adopted from abroad and what incentives drive families to adopt them? In this paper we use the 2000 census to illuminate the landscape of international adoption. We address three issues: 1) How do the demographic characteristics of the children adopted from abroad change as other countries open and shut the door to inter-country adoptions, changing the supply of available children? 2) U.S. born parents and foreign-born parents may have different incentives to adopt. How are these incentives reflected in the characteristics of the children they adopt? 3) What explains differences in the estimates of foreign-born adopted children in the Census and the number of visas granted by the State Department?international adoption, immigrant children

What are the consequences of regularizing undocumented immigrants?

Millions of people enter (or remain in) countries without permission as they flee violence, war, or economic hardship. Regularization policies that offer residence and work rights have multiple and multi-layered effects on the economy and society, but they always directly affect the labor market opportunities of those who are regularized. Large numbers of undocumented people in many countries, a new political willingness to fight for human and civil rights, and dramatically increasing refugee flows mean continued pressure to enact regularization policies

The Economics of Assisted Reproduction

Typically, when two people decide to become parents, they procreate by copulation and produce a child. What do people do if, for some reason, they can?t produce their own children but want to be parents? Today, a prospective parent can go to the web, drop a vial of sperm from a donor with specific selected characteristics into a ?shopping cart? and have that sperm delivered in twenty-four hours. Similarly, one can sift through the profiles and pictures of women who are egg donors and select eggs from women with desired characteristics and arrange an egg delivery. These markets are two segments that loosely fall under the rubric of Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART), which is a shorthand term for the numerous procedures aided by technology used to produce a baby. This primer in the economics of assisted reproduction introduces some of the economic dilemmas brought about by new reproductive technologies. Now the cost of producing children can radically differ among people of similar incomes and values because a prospective parent may have to pay to gain rights to the genetic components that build the child

Rooms of One?s Own : Gender, Race and Home Ownership as Wealth Accumulation in the United States

Do income disparities between men and women translate into longer term wealth disparities? We use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate gender and race disparities in home ownership, value, and equity. These investigations reveal that the gap in housing outcomes is much more pronounced for the probability of home ownership than for home value or home equity. Once households have entered the housing market, differences across gender, race and family type are much smaller and sometimes turn in favor of households that are usually considered to be disadvantaged. Family type is associated with differences that are larger than those based solely on gender and are as large as those associated solely with race. The predicted probability of home ownership ranges from 0.83 for male householders in married couple households to 0.49 for male householders in non-family households. African Americans are consistently predicted to have lower home value, but less consistently predicted to have less equity than whites. We find that race gaps in homeownership, typically attributed to differences in family type (such as prevalence of female headed households in the African American population), are significantly and sizably present within gendered family types

The unknown immigration: incentives and family composition in intercountry adoptions to the United States

Children adopted from abroad are an immigrant group about which little is known. According to the U.S. Census more than one and a half million children living in the U.S. are adopted, with fifteen percent of them born abroad. In fact more than twenty thousand adopted orphans from abroad enter the country each year. The families who adopt these orphans are mostly white, wealthy, and well educated (Kossoudji, 2008). What are the characteristics of children who are adopted from abroad and what incentives drive families to adopt them? In this paper we use the 2000 census to illuminate the landscape of international adoption. We address three issues: 1) How do the demographic characteristics of the children adopted from abroad change as other countries open and shut the door to inter-country adoptions, changing the supply of available children? 2) U.S. born parents and foreign-born parents may have different incentives to adopt. How are these incentives reflected in the characteristics of the children they adopt? 3) What explains differences in the estimates of foreign-born adopted children in the Census and the number of visas granted by the State Department

The effects of language skills on economic assimilation of female immigrants in the United States

This paper uses recent data from the American Community Survey between 2010 and 2015 to investigate the effect of language skills on women's economic assimilation who immigrated to the United States as children. The problem of endogenous language acquisition and measurement error in the language variable is addressed utilizing the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to construct an identifying instrument. Two-stage-least-squares estimates suggest that greater English proficiency has a positive effect on a number of indicators of economic assimilation of adult women including several measures of labor supply and earnings. A range of sensitivity tests are undertaken to check the validity of these results

Guest Workers in the Underground Economy

Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in some host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market levels, many migrants choose to overstay and seek unauthorized employment. The model we develop examines how the wage of illegal aliens and the flow of guest workers transiting to undocumented status are affected by the rules of the program, enforcement measures of the host country, and market conditions facing migrants at home and abroad. Lengthening the duration of official work permits is found to decrease the stock of undocumented workers, but it has an ambiguous effect on their wage. An expansion in the allowed inflow of documented guest workers has a negative impact on the wage of undocumented workers and an ambiguous effect on their stock

Asylum seeking and irregular migration

This paper develops a model of optimizing behavior of asylum seekers whose objective is to reach an advanced country. Their personal characteristics and the challenges anticipated along the way determine whether they try to reach the ultimate destination with the aid of human smugglers or by applying for resettlement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In the current policy environment, individuals who are relatively young, skilled, wealthy, and have access to credit from the family network are found to have a strong incentive to choose the undocumented migration option