In this paper, we assess the likely contribution of immigration over the past three and a half decades to poverty in the U.S. We first document trends in poverty rates among the native-born by race and ethnicity and poverty trends among all immigrants, recent immigrants, and immigrants by their region and (in some instances) country of origin. Next, we assess how poverty rates among immigrants change with time in the United States. Finally, we simulate the effects of competition with immigrant labor on native wages and the likely consequent effects on native poverty rates. We find that international immigration to the U.S. between 1970 and 2005 has increased the overall poverty rate due to the facts that immigrants are more likely to be poor and that an increasing proportion of the U.S. resident population that is foreign born. This effect, however, is modest (it increases U.S. poverty rates by half a percentage point) and transitory, as immigrant poverty rates decline quickly with time in the U.S. Our wage simulations indicate that competition with immigrants does adversely impact those natives, and only those natives, with the least education. However, the impact of wage competition with immigrants on native poverty rates is negligible.

This paper analyzes the effect of regulations governing land use and residential construction upon the course of housing prices in California. We explore the linkage between regulation and housing prices using measures of housing prices estimated from the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1990 and 2000 Census of Population and Housing, together with a detailed cross-sectional land use regulation and growth controls in California cities. We explore mechanisms by which regulatory stringency may affect housing outcomes for consumers. First, we assess whether housing is more expensive in more regulated cities. Second, we assess whether growth in the city-level housing stock over the period of a decade depends on the degree of land-use regulation at the start of the decade. Finally, we estimate the price elasticity of housing supply for regulated and relatively unregulated cities. Our results suggest that current regulations have powerful effects on housing outcomes.

In August 2006, the Italian government released one-third of the nation's prison inmates via a national collective pardon. We test for a discontinuous break in national crime rates corresponding to the mass release. We also test for the effect of the return of the incarceration rate to its predicted steady state level on national crime rates. Finally, we exploit regional variation in prison releases based on the province of residence of pardoned inmates. All three sources of variation yield substantial incapacitation effect estimates and suggest that the crime-preventing effects of incarceration diminish with increases in the incarceration rate.

Gender Differences in the Labor Market: Impact of IRCA by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Cynthia Bansak and Steven Raphael. Published in volume 97, issue 2, pages 412-416 of American Economic Review, May 2007