Immigrant employment through the Great Recession: Individual characteristics and metropolitan contexts

Immigrants continue to settle in metropolitan areas across the United States and bring significant changes to various urban labor markets. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2007 and 2011, we trace the employment outcomes of immigrants compared to native-born workers before and after the recent Great Recession across the 100 largest metropolitan areas and examine individual-level and metropolitan-level factors that shape their employment outcomes. We find that low-skilled workers in general and immigrants without English proficiency and those who are new entrants or earliest arrivals are harder hit in the recession. Latino immigrants and black workers fare worse in areas with high immigrant concentration. Latino immigrants experience employment gains, however, in the South, large urban economies, as well as new immigrant gateways. Asian immigrants see declines in employment likelihood in areas with a large construction sector, while areas with a large trade sector hurt native-born white workers.     

The value of educational degrees in turbulent economic times: Evidence from the Youth Development Study

Rising costs of higher education have prompted debate about the value of college degrees. Using mixed effects panel models of data from the Youth Development Study (ages 31–37), we compare occupational outcomes (i.e., weekly hours worked, earnings, employment status, career attainment, and job security) between educational attainment categories within year, and within categories across years, from 2005 to 2011, capturing the period before, during, and in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Our findings demonstrate the long-term value of post-secondary degrees. Bachelor's and Associate's degree recipients, while experiencing setbacks at the height of recession, were significantly better off than those with some or no college attendance. Vocational-Technical degree holders followed a unique trajectory: pre-recession, they are mostly on par with Associate's and Bachelor's recipients, but they are hit particularly hard by the recession and then rebound somewhat afterwards. Our findings highlight the perils of starting but not finishing post-secondary educational programs.     

Do economic conditions affect climate change beliefs and support for climate action? Evidence from the US in the wake of the Great Recession

I show that climate skepticism increases with negative economic shocks and that the effects are concentrated among individuals in the labor force. I primarily employ a panel of US individuals in the period following the Great Recession, but also find consistent results with an alternative instrumental variables strategy. Among labor force participants, a one-percentage point increase in the local unemployment rate leads to a three to five percentage point decrease in the probability of believing climate change is real and requires action. I conclude that support for climate change policies could depend on labor market conditions.     

Tax structure and state economic growth during the Great Recession

Concern about the effect of taxes on economic growth and development in the United States is longstanding. While most studies are concerned with the growth impacts of tax burden, marginal rates, or the impact of a particular tax, there are few works that examine the impact of tax structure in the way it is defined in this work. Here, tax structure is defined as the shares of revenue collected by various taxes. Using a pool of data on the 50 states between 2004 and 2010, this paper explores the relationship between state and local tax structure and growth of real per-capita GDP through the Great Recession centered in 2008. The results are used to generate estimates of the growth impacts of revenue neutral changes in tax shares.     

国家兴衰与贫富的相关理论评述——兼论中国的经济地位

世界经济发展史就是一部＂丰裕中的贫困史＂,富裕与贫穷国家同在。与此同时,世界经济霸权不断更迭,是什么决定了世界的＂赢家＂和＂输家＂？学者们从不同的角度进行了探讨：基于资源基础的国民财富论观、基于企业和产业的竞争力强弱观、基于文化和历史视角的国家贫富观、基于生命周期理论的国家盛衰观、基于利益集团的兴衰观。这些观点对于走在＂复兴＂之路上的中国经济发展具有重要的借鉴意义,也值得我们深思中国在世界经济格局中的地位。     

State-by-state variations in high-tech employment through the great recession

This paper explores the relationship between state-level high-tech employment and state economic development, labor, and tax policies over the 2007–2012 period. During this period national high-tech manufacturing employment decreased, national high-tech service employment increased and the nation experienced a severe recession. Overall high-tech employment grew very little during this time period but changes in high-tech employment varied substantially from state-to-state. This paper asks why. A two-stage empirical model is developed and estimated. Among other things the results indicate that these policies did influence employment in the period although perhaps in unexpected ways.     

The guaranteed minimum income in Portugal: A universal safety net under political and financial pressure

The Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) was created in Portugal by a centre-left Socialist Party government in 1996, as the most important constitutive part of a ‘new generation of active social policies,’ which completed the existence in Portugal of a universal system of guaranteed income. Its transformation into a Social Integration Income (SII) in 2003 and its retrenchment in the period of the Great Recession and troika austerity (2011–2015) has reduced the scope of this policy measure as a universal safety net policy. This article examines the context and the major drivers for the creation and for the policy changes that occurred in the GMI/SII. Looking at the political debates and the changes in this policy measure along this period, we argue that the major reforms introduced since its creation reflect ideological cleavages within the political arena. Considering the very low share in total government current expenditure of GMI/SII, this can explain the social policy selective retreat associated to the changes introduced in this policy measure by the centre-right coalition in government, in the latest period of cost containment of social policy in Portugal, leading to a great decrease in the number of beneficiaries and to an increase of its inadequacy.     

New evidence on racial and ethnic disparities in homeownership in the United States from 2001 to 2010

Using 2001–2010 homeownership data for the United States we analyze changes in racial and ethnic disparities between whites and blacks, Asians, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics. We employ Integrated Public Use Microdata (IPUMS) combined with local credit scores and house price to income ratios. Controlling for demographic, income, wealth, employment, and housing characteristics, we find no significant differences between whites and Asians, Mexicans, or Cubans. Conversely, blacks and Puerto Ricans remain substantially disadvantaged. We conduct further analysis for the 2001–2003, 2004–2007, and 2008–2010 periods of the housing boom and collapse. Blacks and Puerto Ricans experienced decreased disparities during the peak years of the boom. Puerto Rican parity with whites continued to improve during the crash while gains among blacks eroded. The results suggest the homeownership differences between whites, Asians, Mexicans, and Cubans are apparently explained by socioeconomic status while racial disparities among blacks and Puerto Ricans evolved but continue to persist.     

Populism as a Collective Action Master Frame for Transnational Mobilization

Occupy Wall Street, the Greek and Spanish indignados , and other important movements swept across the Western world from 2011 onward, redefining political and social conflict during the global economic meltdown of the Great Recession. These movements have earned well‐deserved academic attention, but the resulting scholarship is lacking a crucial pillar: a comparative analysis of the collective action frames employed by movement entrepreneurs. To identify the master frame at work and uncover shared processes of strategic meaning making and collective identity construction during this transnational cycle of contention, I analyze primary data, exploring diagnostic, prognostic, and adversarial framing elements as found in the movements’ widely circulated manifestos. The populist frame emerges as the master frame of the cycle, encapsulating the adversarial discourse of the dominant dichotomy of a noble “people” and a corrupt “elite” that resonated strongly with mobilized individuals and allowed movement entrepreneurs to construct a transnationally shared collective identity across populations of widely diverging social, political, and economic backgrounds.     

Inventories and the Three Phases of the Business Cycle

This article demonstrates that recessions typically are followed by high-growth recovery phases that push output back to its prerecession level. Thus postwar fluctuations in real output in the United States have consisted of three sequential phases rather than two—contractions, high-growth recoveries, and moderate-growth periods following recoveries. Data from before World War II also exhibit this pattern. For the postwar period, the three-phase pattern is shown to reflect swings in inventory investment and suggests that output fluctuations have an important transitory component. The evidence in this article supports DeLong and Summers's output-gaps view and Friedman's “plucking” model view of fluctuations.