We study the link between residential segregation and fertility for the socially excluded and marginalized Roma ethnic minority. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether fertility differs between ethnically homogeneous and mixed neighborhoods. Our results show that Roma in less-segregated areas tend to have significantly fewer children (around 0.8). Most of the difference arises from Roma in less-segregated areas waiting substantially more after having a boy than their counterparts in more-segregated areas. We exploit variation in the share of Serbian sounding first names to provide evidence that a mechanism at play is a shift in preferences toward lower fertility and sons rather than daughters induced by a higher exposure to the Serbian majority culture.

The paper investigates the relation between overeducation and self-employment, in a comparative analysis between immigrants and natives. Using the EU Labour Force Survey for the year 2012 and controlling for a list of demographic characteristics and general characteristics of 30 destination countries, it finds that the likelihood of being overeducated decreases for self-employed immigrants, with inconclusive results for self-employed natives. The results shed light on the extent to which immigrants adjust to labor market imperfections and barriers to employment and might help explain the higher incidence of self-employment that immigrants exhibit, when compared to natives. This is the first study to systematically study the nexus between overeducation and self-employment in a comparative framework. Moreover, the paper tests the robustness of the results by employing two different measures of overeducation, contributing to the literature of the measurement of overeducation.

We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of segregation by literacy. Regression analyses with county-fixed effects show that a larger share of Protestants is associated with higher literacy rates across all location types. A larger share of Jews relative to Catholics is not significantly associated with higher literacy in towns, but it is in villages and manors. Finally, a larger share of Jews is associated with lower fertility in towns, which is not explained by differences in literacy.

Immigration has changed the United States from having a predominantly white to a more ethnically diverse population. People who move to the U.S. may initially have diets unlike native-born Americans but gradually adopt eating patterns more like them. Using NHANES data and a censored gamma regression model, this study estimated the daily consumption of major food products among groups of immigrants and the corresponding groups born in the U.S. Results show that immigrants had lower consumption of meat and higher consumption of fruits and vegetables, and immigrants’ consumption converged towards a less healthy American diet after five years in the U.S.

Inclusion of additional dimensions to population projections can lead to an improvement in the overall quality of the projections and to an enhanced analytical potential of derived projections such as literacy skills and labor force participation. This paper describes the modeling of educational attainment of a microsimulation projection model of the European Union countries. Using ordered logistic regressions on five waves of the European Social Survey, we estimate the impact of mother's education and other sociocultural characteristics on educational attainment and implement them into the microsimulation model. Results of the different projection scenarios are contrasted to understand how the education of the mother and sociocultural variables may affect projection outcomes. We show that a change in the impact of mother's education on children's educational attainment may have a big effect on future trends. Moreover, the proposed approach yields more consistent population projection outputs for specific subpopulations.

Female family headship has strong implications for endemic poverty in the United States. Consequently, it is imperative to explore the chief factors that contribute to this problem. Departing from prior literature that places significant weight on welfare-incentive effects, our study highlights the role of male marriageability in explaining the prevalence of never-married female family headship for blacks and whites. Specifically, we examine racial differences in the effect of male marriageability on never-married female headship from 1980 to 2010. By exploiting data from IPUMS-USA (N = 4,958,722) and exogenous variation from state-level sentencing reforms, the study finds that the decline in the relative supply of marriageable males significantly increases the incidence of never-married female family headship for blacks but not for whites.

It is widely known that the Roma have been suffering persistent disadvantages. Yet, little empirical evidence exists. Using the censuses of 1977, 1992, 2002, and 2011, I provide a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and an outlook on the future of the Roma in Romania, home to a large and rapidly growing Roma community. Young Roma, in particular girls, are less likely to be attending school, indicating that lack of educational attainment is likely to persist. The Roma have worse housing conditions and face lower employment and higher unemployment levels. Amongst Roma, females are less likely to be employed than males. Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions of the ethnic and gender employment gaps reveal that the differences in employment cannot be fully explained by observables, such as age or education. Despite the seemingly dire picture, there are signs of improvement for more recent cohorts, as literacy rates have reached close to universal levels.

This study utilizes Farm Service Agency lending data to verify if previous racial and gender bias allegations still persist in more recent lending decisions. Beyond loan approval decisions, this study focuses on trends in direct loan packaging terms for approved single proprietorship farm borrowers. Results indicate that although no significant disparities were noted in loan amounts and maturities prescribed for various racial and gender minority groups, nonwhite male and female borrowers were usually charged higher interest rates than the others. Loan pricing differentials could have been the lenders' strategy for price management of borrowers' credit risks.

This paper identifies the individual components of social harm associated with a hypothetical racially targeted police encounter. Individuals who believe they are being targeted by police because they are members of a racial minority may suffer from fear of physical harm and humiliation by the encounter itself. However, the very fact that individuals will be racially targeted for a police encounter also causes harm to other members of the minority group even if they are not directly subject to an unwarranted encounter. In addition to fear and anxiety over the risk of such an encounter, they will often undertake costly avoidance behaviors to reduce their risk, or to mitigate the risk of any harm if such an encounter occurs. In addition, other members of society who value a nondiscriminatory policing policy might be willing to pay to reduce such unwarranted police encounters, and hence suffer a loss from this policing policy. In addition to discussing possible methodologies for estimating these cost components, this paper raises several issues that must be resolved – such as how to deal with the difference between perceived and actual racially targeted police encounters.

This paper argues that the conventional strategy of identifying a cultural effect using variation across countries of origin may be biased because the assumption that all immigrants make their choices in an identical environment in the host country is unlikely to hold true, even when controlling for individual characteristics. We discuss different mechanisms behind the bias and propose to eliminate it by exploiting only the variation within countries of origin. In our application (fertility of immigrants in Germany), the cultural effect survives this more demanding specification; however, the estimated coefficient is smaller compared to estimations that rely on cross-country variation for identification. We also show that the cultural influence is considerably smaller in the second generation of immigrants.

State and local pension plans are increasingly moving from the traditional defined benefit (DB) model to non-DB models that generally allow for participant-directed investment. This shift has important implications for the management of the more than US$3 trillion in assets held to finance public employee retirement benefits. To investigate these implications, we introduce new data from a nationwide survey of public DB and non-DB plans and a unique data set on thousands of individual investors in the state of Florida's defined contribution (DC) plan. Using these sources, we explore how participant involvement in the public sector affects the distribution of asset class allocations, management fees, investment outcomes, and portfolio rebalancing at both the individual and aggregate levels. We found that there is little difference between the DB and non-DB plans in terms of asset mix, returns, and fees, except that DB plan have greater access and allocations to alternative investments. We also found that while the average individual DC plan participant allocated their asset similarly to the DB plan, black females and older white males, on average, invested on opposite tails of the risk spectrum.

Research on anti-immigrant attitudes in the United Kingdom in the past has focused primarily on feelings of prejudice driven by local concentrations of ethnic minorities. The immigration debate, however, has arguably changed since the EU expansions and the economic crisis of the past decade. This paper tests whether public support for immigration restriction is empirically driven by factors such as resource scarcity and economic stagnation, skill supply of native and immigrant workers, and the origin of immigrants from poorer countries within and outside the EU. Survey data from the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2010 are matched with regional level indicators calculated using the UK Labour Force Surveys. Findings suggest that support for immigration restriction is higher in regions where more immigrants are unemployed, but lower in regions where more natives are unemployed for longer than a year. Both the origin and ethnicity of the immigrant population appear to play a role in immigration policy preferences among native respondents.

The European Union aims at a stronger participation by its population in work to foster growth and welfare. There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labour force, and discussions about the necessary policy responses. Integrated labour and migration policies are needed. The employment chances of the low-skilled are limited. Whereas Europe could benefit from a substantive immigration policy that imposes selection criteria that are more in line with economic needs, the substantial immigration into the European Union follows largely non-economic motives. This paper discusses the economic rationale of a selective immigration policy and provides empirical evidence about the adverse effects of current selection mechanisms.

We study the relationship between the off-farm labor decision and the limited-resource farmers' and spouses' off-farm wages, experience, education, and sources of income. We found that farmers' and spouses' off-farm experience and wages are significant factors in explaining the off-farm labor supply decision. Contrary to expectations, farm income variability is not significant in the farmers' and spouses' decision to seek off-farm work. The off-farm labor supply of farmers and their spouses is negatively correlated with income transfers from the government. It was also found that the spouse is a residual supplier of on-farm and off-farm labor.

Dans cet article, nous étudions comment une manière de communiquer « unifiée » ou, au contraire, « stratifiée » peut apparaître selon les caractéristiques sociologiques ou technologique d’une économie. La communication est moins efficace dans le cas stratifié parce que les gens qui parlent différentes langues ne peuvent pas communiquer entre eux.

Les principaux résultats sont les suivants: premièrement, le niveau d’instruction à l’équilibre est sous-optimalement faible à cause de « la faible externalité de marché » associée à la langue. Deuxièment, la stratification sociale fait naître une stratification linguistique et conduit, en raison des échecs de communication, à une diminution de la production et du bien-être. Troisièmement, la faible externalité de marché entraine trop de stratification. Quatrièmement, les technologies spécialisées sont moins vulnérables à la stratification que les technologies flexibles, ou en d’autres termes, l’accroissement de la flexibilité peut avoir des effets pervers sur la production lorsque la société est stratifiée.