Chutes or Ladders? A Longitudinal Analysis of Immigrant Earnings

This study uses Social Security earnings records matched to recent cross-sections of the SIPP and CPS to study the earnings progress of U.S. immigrants.The data show that immigrants' earnings grow 10 to 13 percent during their first twenty years in the U.S. relative to the earnings of natives with similar labor market experience. By comparison, estimates of immigrants' relative wage growth from cross-sections of the decennial Census are substantially higher. The divergent results reflect the selective outmigration of low--earning immigrants. The longitudinal earnings histories also show that 14 percent of immigrants have earnings in the U.S. prior to their most recent date of arrival, which points to a significant amount of back-and-forth migration between the U.S. and immigrants' home countries. The misclassification in previous work of these largely low-wage immigrants as recent arrivals accounts for close to one-third of the measured decline in the level of earnings of immigrant arrival cohorts between 1960 and 1980. The new evidence presented here, therefore, suggests that previous analyses had overestimated both the rate of earnings growth among immigrants who remain in the U.S. and the secular decline in the level of earnings across arrival cohorts.Immigrant earnings, longitudinal data, labor markets, wages, censored least absolute deviation model

The Effect of Changes in the U.S. Wage Structure on Recent Immigrants' Earnings

Since recent immigrants tend to earn less than natives, their relative labor market status has been adversely impacted by an increase in the return to labor market skills and widening wage inequality over the past two decades. To evaluate the magnitude of this effect, this study uses Social Security earnings records matched to recent cross--sections of the SIPP and CPS to estimate the change in the return to skills among native--born workers. This is then used to adjust the earnings gap between immigrants and natives in order to estimate what the gap would have been if the return to skills had remained at its 1980 level. The results suggest that the return to skills rose by 40 percent between 1980 and 1997, leading to a 10 to 15 percentage point decrease in the relative earnings of recent immigrants. Thus examining solely the earnings of recent immigrants may lead to an overly pessimistic picture of their actual labor market skills.Immigrant earnings and skills, returns to skill, U.S. wage structure

Premium Copayments and the Trade-off between Wages and Employer-Provided Health Insurance

This paper estimates the trade-off between salary and health insurance costs using data on Illinois school teachers between 1991 and 2008 that allow us to address several common empirical challenges in this literature. We find no evidence that changes in teachers’ salaries respond to changes in insurance cost, but teachers paid about 17 percent of the cost of individual health insurance and about 46 percent of the cost of their family members’ plans through increased premium copayments. Our results indicate that premium increases were not associated with commensurate increases in teachers’ valuation of their health insurance plans

Efficient Discrete Approximations of Quantum Gates

Quantum compiling addresses the problem of approximating an arbitrary quantum gate with a string of gates drawn from a particular finite set. It has been shown that this is possible for almost all choices of base sets and furthermore that the number of gates required for precision epsilon is only polynomial in log 1/epsilon. Here we prove that using certain sets of base gates quantum compiling requires a string length that is linear in log 1/epsilon, a result which matches the lower bound from counting volume up to constant factor.Comment: 7 pages, no figures, v3 revised to correct major error in previous version

Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient

We show that the well-known positive association between health and income in adulthood has antecedents in childhood. Using the National Health Interview Surveys, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we find that children's health is positively related to household income. The relationship between household income and children's health status becomes more pronounced as children grow older. A large component of the relationship between income and children's health can be explained by the arrival and impact of chronic health conditions in childhood. Children from lower-income households with chronic health conditions have worse health than do children from higher-income households. Further, we find that children's health is closely associated with long-run average household income, and that the adverse health effects of lower permanent income accumulate over children's lives. Part of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status may work through the impact of parents' long run average income on children's health.

New perspectives on health and health care policy

Health care reform has been the primary focus of policymakers for much of the past year, culminating with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010. The vigorous national debate on the act has highlighted the importance of innovative, high-quality research on health and health care policy.Insurance, Health ; Medicare

Essays in Applied Labor Economics: Immigrant Earnings and Welfare Reform: Dissertation Summary

In this dissertation, I analyze two distinct issues. In the first part, I use a new data source to address an old and rather controversial topic in labor economics: how well immigrants fare in the U.S. labor market. The second part is motivated by the recent overhaul of the federal welfare system and examines whether increased labor market participation by welfare recipients will displace employment or reduce the earnings of other low-skilled workers in the labor market. This is investigated through a study of the 1991 elimination of the General Assistance program in Michigan

Foundations of Behavioral Health

Even in the twenty-first century, the public health community continues to face formidable challenges. There is a need for more integrative and collaborative approaches in public health initiatives, considering the complex relationships among the social determinants of health within natural and built environments, population health and health-care systems, and economic, education, and social and community contexts. The continuing changes in the landscape of public health challenge our ability to reconceptualize our approach to how health-care professionals can contribute to health promotion, health education, and disease prevention efforts in communities constantly facing the globalization of communicable and noncommunicable diseases and environmental threats due to man-made and natural disasters

The Labor Market Effects of Welfare Reform

The recent reform of the federal welfare system is meant to encourage recipients to leave welfare and enter the workforce. If the reform is successful there are likely to be effects felt throughout the low-- skilled end of the labor market. As former welfare recipients enter the labor market, they may exert downward pressure on wages or displace employment of others already in the labor market. Since there has been limited changes in eligibility for federal welfare programs from which to draw inferences, the magnitude of these labor market effects are open to debate. This study considers these issues in general and evaluates how labor markets in Michigan were affected when the General Assistance program in that state was eliminated in 1991. General Assistance was a large-- scale, state--administered program that provided benefits to people who fell through the cracks in federal anti--poverty programs. In all, about eighty to one--hundred thousand able--bodied adults lost benefits. Increased labor force participation among these people resulted in a decline in weekly hours among high school drop--outs of 1.2 to 2.4 percent. There is little evidence of declines in hourly earnings, except in the Detroit area, where wages fell by about five percent.Welfare reform, General Assistance, labor markets