A Test of Congressional Voting on Immigration Restrictions

Immigration policy is supplied endogenously through a political process that weighs the impacts of immigration on factor owners, together with other interests, in determining policy outcomes. The relative significance of constituent interests and legislator ideology in shaping policy is tested by identifying the correlates of congressional voting on immigration legislation. Conservative lawmakers are found to generally support stricter immigration controls. Legislators representing border states and urban areas favor looser restrictions, possibly reflecting the political influence of recent immigrants. There is evidence that immigration reform is a normal good and that substitutability between native and immigrant labor promotes tighter immigration restrictions

The Interdependence Between Homeland Security Efforts of a State and a Terrorist\u27s Choice of Attack

Consider a state that chooses security levels at two sites (Targets A and B), after which a terrorist chooses which site to attack (and potentially a scope of attack). The state values A more highly. If the state knows which target the terrorist values more highly, he will choose a higher level of security at this site. Under complete information, if the terrorist’s only choice is which site to attack, the state will set security levels for which the terrorist prefers to attack A over B if and only if the ratio of the value of B to the value of A is greater for the state than for the terrorist. When the state has incomplete information on the terrorist’s target values, the optimal security levels may be such that: a target is completely undefended (but attacked with positive probability); the probability of attack is greater at A than at B; and the expected damage from an attack is greater at A than at B. In total, the results reveal that the state’s choice of security is heavily influenced by the terrorist’s target valuations

Impact of Apartheid on Economic Growth: Implications and Empirical Evidence from South Africa

Even with the end of apartheid in South Africa, the impact of apartheid-like policies on economic growth remains an important policy issue. Our results, from two panels of ‘peer’ countries, which were roughly comparable to South Africa, show that apartheid policies that led to insufficient investment in physical and human capital and high shares of government consumption contributed to South Africa's poor growth performance during apartheid. We also find some support for the hypothesis that apartheid policies caused low productivity and inefficient use of inputs, but South Africa's abundance of natural resources at times obscured this effect.

Local Public Goods and Jim Crow

Labor market discrimination and racial segregation can be viewed as part of a more general tendency for residents of a community to limit the community's size or its factor-ownership composition. Statutory segregation is motivated not only by racial prejudice, but also by a desire to maximize factor incomes and the average net benefit obtained from local-public-goods consumption. Race is one of many possible devices that might be used to distinguish community members from non-members. Predictions for racial discrimination and segregation derived from this local-public-goods approach are tested with data from the Jim Crow era.