"Train Wreck: US Immigration and Border Policy 1965-2010."

Abstract: Despite the massive increase in border enforcement after 1986, undocumented population growth did not decrease, but rose. In this talk I undertake a systematic analysis of border enforcement as a policy for immigration control. Empirical results explain not only why it failed, but how and why it backfired. In the end, the militarization of the border did not increase the probability of apprehension at the border or reduce the likelihood of unauthorized entry; but it did dramatically change the geography of border crossing, increase the costs of undocumented migration, and elevate the physical risks of border crossing. Ironically, these trends had no effect on the likelihood of undocumented departure for the United States, but instead reduced the probability undocumented returns back to Mexico, thereby increasing the net volume of undocumented migration and accelerating undocumented population growth.
*Co-Sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration and the Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility working group. 

"The Uphill Climb: A Transnational Perspective on Wealth Accumulation among Latino Immigrants in Durham, NC"

Abstract: Wealth accumulation is a key dimension of ethno-racial stratification, and, among immigrants, an important indicator of incorporation. Dramatically low assets among immigrant Latinos is thus a pressing concern, necessitating a better understanding of the social forces that shape wealth assimilation. Drawing on a survey of Latino immigrants in Durham, NC, I argue for the importance of a transnational perspective on wealth for immigrant populations. Nationally representative surveys designed to assess inequality among the general population generally lack information on wealth held abroad, which accounts for the lion’s share of assets held by immigrants in our sample. Likewise, these data sources rarely have information on factors salient to immigrants, particularly legal status and informal employment. Finally, I show that the socio-demographic characteristics central to life-cycle wealth models operate in different ways for U.S. and foreign assets, and for men and women. For instance, while household earnings and duration of Durham residence are associated with greater U.S. assets among Durham’s Latino migrants, they fail to predict wealth held abroad. Likewise, low educational attainment and informal employment are associated with lower U.S., but not foreign, wealth. Instead, the key predictors of wealth abroad relate to family structure. I further document structural barriers to immigrant Latino wealth accumulation, such as employment marginality and lack of access to mainstream financial institutions.
*Co-Sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration 

"How Multiracial Identities and Racial Classification Shape Latinos’ Dating Preferences"

Abstract: Understanding how life experiences vary by different dimensions of race may help clarify the growing Latino population’s place in the U.S. racial structure. This study examines how self-identifying with more than one racial group and racial classification relate to racial dating choices among Latinos. Analyses of data from online dating profiles reveal divergent patterns in stated racial preferences among Latinos depending upon whether and how they also identify with other racial groups. Latinos who identify as White express racial preferences that are more similar to Whites than to monoracial Latinos, while the preferences of Black-identified Latinos are more similar to Blacks, consistent with Whitening and Black exceptionalism theories. However, regardless of racial self-identity, Latino online daters vary in their exclusion of Whites depending upon how they are racially classified by others. These findings suggest that Latinos’ racial preferences are influenced by the existing racial structure and that Latinos contribute to maintaining the racial hierarchy through their dating choices. In addition, the findings suggest multiple assimilation trajectories within this diverse population.
*Co-Sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration 

"Intergenerational Relationships among Latino Immigrant Families in Spain: Conflict and Emotional Intimacy"

Abstract: Relationships with parents have been identified as a major factor in shaping adolescents’ well-being and cognitive development. Compared to adolescents in native families, immigrant children face multiple stressors associated with international migration that may cause the relationship with their parents to be more conflictive or emotionally distant. In this paper, we compare the levels of mother-child conflict and emotional intimacy among Latino immigrant and Spanish native families living in Spain. Our analysis shows that Latino adolescents do not describe the relationship with their mothers as more conflictive than natives do. However, they report more emotional distance with their mothers than native adolescents. This differential with natives cannot be fully attributed to migration-related factors like physical separation from parents due to staggered family migration, to the lower life satisfaction of Latino mothers’ in their new destination or to an acculturation gap between mother and child. However, the fact that immigrant mothers spend less time doing activities with their children, probably due to their harder working conditions, explains part of the differential in emotional intimacy with native families. Finally, our analyses clearly establish an equally negative relationship between conflict and emotional intimacy for both native and Latino immigrant families.

"A Large-Scale Survey of International Migrants from Rural Bangladesh: Longitudinal Evidence on Migration Costs, Earnings and Health"

Abstract: Popular attention has focused on the harsh conditions facing overseas guest workers from countries such as Bangladesh to the states of the Persian Gulf, with the assumption of negative health consequences. In contrast, the global empirical literature on migrant health finds generally positive health outcomes for migrants relative to those left-behind, due in large part to self-selection. Yet most such studies match separate datasets from sending and destination country rather than using a binational panel survey. Few focus on guest workers or migrants to non-OECD destinations. The Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS) is a binational panel survey that follows a representative sample of a rural area of Bangladesh from 1996-7 to 2012-4. Between survey rounds, one quarter of young adult males moved outside the country (most to the Persian Gulf), with one-third migrating internally. All out-migrants were followed, including festival and phone interviews with overseas migrants. MHSS2 achieved a 92% reinterview rate, including 87% of overseas migrants. This paper provides preliminary assessment of data quality for phone and festival interviews, and measures the effects of migrant status (international, internal), return migrant and country of destination on livelihoods, physical health and mental health. Regression estimates account for the potential confounding effects of current and past socioeconomic characteristics of the migrant, his parents, family and community using data back to 1974. Propensity score estimates account for the effects of self-selection into migration, while bounding exercises address the potential effects of differential inter-survey mortality.

"Policing and the Educational Performance of Minority Youth"

Abstract: How does the expansion of police presence in poor urban communities affect educational outcomes? Exploiting a quasi-experimental design from New York City, we present causal evidence of the impact of aggressive, zero-tolerance policing on the educational performance of minority youth. Under Operation Impact, the New York Police Department (NYPD) saturated high crime areas with additional police officers with the mission to engage in aggressive order maintenance policing. We used administrative data from about 680,000 adolescents aged 10 to 14 and exploited quasi-random variation in the relative timing of police surges and the date of standardized exams among children in the same neighborhood. Exposure to police surges significantly reduced test scores for African-American boys. The size of the effect increases with age but there is no discernible effect for African-American girls and Hispanics. Aggressive policing can thus lower the educational performance of African-American youth and perpetuate the racial achievement gap.

"Boomer and Millennial Young Adulthood Relationships: A Demographic Perspective"

Abstract: Baby Boomers were at the forefront of many changes in young adult relationship and family experiences. Today a new cohort, Millennials, outnumber Boomers and have redefined young adulthood. Dr. Manning will contrast the relationship experiences of young adult Boomers and Millennials. She will share new findings about recent patterns and trends in the formation and stability of young adult relationships. Concluding comments will focus on challenges and opportunities for research on young adults in the United States.
*Co-sponsored with The Family Working Group at UCLA

"A re-appraisal of thinking on and the empirical evaluation of migration theories"

Abstract: Over the last quarter Century, there has been considerable efforts to systematize knowledge on and empirically test the drivers of population mobility around a set of eight theories that either explain the initiation or continuation of international labor migration flows. In this presentation, I provide a reflection aimed at furthering theoretical development and empirical testing of these theories. I do so by: (1) providing more specific guidance on how the different theories’ overlapping scales of influence interrelate more specifically than examined in prior work; (2) arguing for a more complete formulation of some of these theories to better explain contemporary immigration flows; and (3) discussing whether/how these theories can help bridge the understanding of the “drivers” of internal vs. international migration, and of labor vs. other kinds of mobility, including some forms of forced displacement. Throughout, I also discuss how the quantitative testing of these theories has fallen into pitfalls of both thinking measurement, which have likely led to a misattribution of the relative importance of some theories, suggesting some refinements on the empirical validation of and the more general use of these theories in guiding empirical analysis going forward.
*Co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of International Migration and the Center for Mexican Studies 

"The Health Effects of Cesarean Delivery for Low-Risk First Births"

Abstract: Cesarean delivery for low-risk pregnancies is generally associated with worse health outcomes for infants and mothers. The interpretation of this correlation, however, is confounded by potential selectivity in the choice of birth mode. We use birth records from California, merged with hospital and emergency department (ED) visits for infants and mothers in the year after birth, to study the casual health effects of cesarean delivery for low-risk first births. Building on McClellan, McNeil, and Newhouse (1994), we use the relative distance from a mother's home to hospitals with high and low c-section rates as an instrument for c-section.  We show that relative distance is a strong predictor of c-section but is orthogonal to many observed risk factors, including birth weight and indicators of prenatal care.  Our IV estimates imply that cesarean delivery causes a relatively large increase in ED visits of the infant, mainly due to acute respiratory conditions. We find no significant effects on mothers’ hospitalizations or ED use after birth, or on subsequent fertility, but we find a ripple effect on second birth outcomes arising from the high likelihood of repeat c-section. Offsetting these morbidity effects, we find that delivery at a high c-section hospital leads to a significant reduction in infant mortality, driven by lower death rates for newborns with high rates of pre-determined risk factors.

"The Midlife Crisis in Humans and Other Animals"

Abstract: The talk will discuss the concept of the midlife crisis. It will examine international evidence on happiness, mental health, suicide, antidepressant consumption, sleep, and so on. Not all the data will be on human beings. The talk will say something about where we are scientifically, and what we need to understand next. Plenty of time will be left for open discussion.
*Co-Sponsored with Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar (PPASS)

"Inequality around the World: Evidence and Implications"

Abstract: The lecture will present new evidence on global inequality and growth since 1980 using the World and Wealth Income Database. We combine data across countries in a homogeneous way to analyze world inequality. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of fast growth in large emerging countries. We plot the curve of cumulated growth from 1980 to 2016 for each percentile of the global distribution of income per adult. This curve has an elephant shape as growth rates have been particularly high around the median (due to growth in China and India), growth rates have been low for the middle classes of advanced economies, and growth rates have been explosive for the global top income earners. We estimate the future evolution of global inequality between now and 2050 combining projected macro growth rates and within country inequality evolution based on past trends.
*Co-sponsored with the Department of Economics and Anderson School of Management and Public Policy and Applied Social Science Seminar (PPASS)

Please join us to hear our residents interesting research and give feedback for their upcoming PAA presentations.
Presenters: 

• Elior Cohen, "The impact of skilled immigration on innovation in the Age of Mass Migration"
• Sara Johnsen, “Continuity and Change in Contraceptive Female Sterilization in the United States, 1982 – 2015”
• Wookun Kim, “Does Pro-Natalist Cash Transfer Work? Evidence from Local Programs in South Korea”
• Ravaris Moore, “The Effects of Exposure to Community Gun-Violence on the High School Dropout Rates of California Public School Students”

"Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison"

Abstract: This talk will address my new book, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison. The book  tells the stories of the men and women I met through the Boston Reentry Study, a series of interviews my research team and I conducted with people leaving prison for neighborhoods around Boston. We were trying to understand what happens when people return to a community, and the challenges faced by them and their families. How did they look for work and housing? How did they manage their addictions or mental illness, and why did some return to incarceration? In trying to answer these questions, I hoped to bear witness to the lives held captive in America’s experiment with mass incarceration. The research showed that imprisonment is followed by deep poverty, in which unemployment is widespread and survival is assisted only by government programs and family support. While earlier studies have focused on the stigma of a criminal record, the men and women of Boston also struggled greatly with human frailty -- mental illness, addiction, and physical disability -- that threatened success after incarceration and impaired the effectiveness of programs. They had experienced serious violence, often as perpetrators, but just as frequently as victims and witnesses, and often since early childhood. Under these conditions, freedom after prison was not a status granted by release, but something attained gradually. Becoming free was a process of social integration where one had to find one’s place with kin and community.
*Co-sponsored with the California Policy Lab 

"Self-selection or enabling environments: What predicts the association between short-term mobility and sexual behavior?"

Abstract: Short-term mobility is often associated with increased risk behavior. For example, mobile individuals often have higher rates of sexual risk behavior compared to non-mobile individuals, but the reasons why are not clear. Using monthly retrospective panel data from Ghana, we test whether short-term mobility is associated with differences in total and unprotected sex acts, and whether the association is due to enabling, selection, or influential reasons. In other words, do mobile individuals express higher levels of risk due to an environment that enables that risk? Alternatively, mobile individuals may be selected on some trait that predicts less aversion to risk. Men who were mobile in a given month had more sex acts compared to non-mobile men. Regardless of short-term mobility in a given month, both men and women who were mobile in future months had more sex acts compared to individuals not mobile in future months. Our findings support the hypothesis that both men and women who are mobile are positively selected on sexual risk behavior. The enabling hypothesis, that the act of being mobile enables sexual risk behavior, was only supported for men.

"When the Money Runs Out: Do Cash Transfers Have Sustained Effects on Human Capital Accumulation?"

Abstract: The five-year evaluation of a cash transfer program targeted to young women points to both the promise and limitations of cash transfers for persistent welfare gains. Conditional cash transfers produced sustained improvements in education and fertility for initially out-of-school females, but caused no gains in other outcomes. Significant declines in HIV prevalence, pregnancy and early marriage observed during the program among recipients of unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) evaporated quickly after the cessation of support. However, children born to UCT beneficiaries during the program had significantly higher height-for-age z-scores at follow-up pointing to the potential importance of cash during critical periods.