border is not a new phenomenon, with previous surges occurring in the 1920s and 1950s, persis tent mass migration did not take hold until late in the twentieth century. Among the factors contributing to emigration from Mexico are weak growth in the country's labor demand and strong growth in its labor sup ply. Mexico's economy stagnated in the 1980s and 1990s, such that per capita GDP in the early 2000s was unchanged from two decades before. During periods of wage decline in Mexico, emi gration from the country spiked. Perhaps less appreciated is that the 1980s were also a period of accelerated growth in Mexico's relative labor supply. With the US baby boom peaking in 1960, the number of US native born individuals coming of working age actually declined in the 1980s. Adding in the secular increase in US educational attain ment, the number of native born American workers with less than a high school education has dropped sharply. In Mexico, high levels of fertility in the 1960s and 1970s meant that two decades hence the country had large numbers of young adults entering the labor force. While educational attainment has also increased in

The Impact of Unexpected Maternal Death on Education: First Evidence from Three National Administrative Data Links by Stacey H. Chen, Yen-Chien Chen and Jin-Tan Liu. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 149-53 of American Economic Review, May 2009

We examine how shareholder-level taxes affect the contemporaneous pricing of foreign firms' U.S. cross-listed and underlying home-country securities surrounding the 1997 reduction in U.S. capital gains tax rates. Consistent with tax capitalization, we find that the performance of cross-listed shares is negatively related to dividend yield, suggesting an abnormal price increase for shares with greater anticipated taxable capital gains. Due to barriers to cross-border arbitrage, underlying home-country securities, on average, do not react during the event, creating a temporary tax-induced pricing spread. When costs of arbitrage are low, the pricing disparity quickly dissipates and home-country shares closely mirror the pricing of their cross-listed counterparts. In further tests, we are unable to document lock-in behavior, which predicates a decrease in prices attributable to a surge in volume for shares with greater accrued taxable capital gains. Overall, our findings suggest that an exogenous shock to the U.S. tax regime reverberates in international asset prices, thereby affecting foreign firms' costs of capital.

This paper studies the second-moment properties of offshoring, the arrangement whereby firms carry out particular stages of production abroad. It documents a new empirical regularity: maquiladora industries in Mexico that are associated with US offshoring experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as volatile as the corresponding industries in the United States. This finding is not attributable simply to higher volatility in the overall Mexican economy, nor to the smaller size of Mexico's industries compared to US counterparts.

We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer packaged goods industries across the 50 largest U.S. cities. Current market shares are higher in markets closest to a brand’s historic city of origin than in those farthest. For six industries, we know the order of entry among the top brands in each of the markets. We find an early entry effect on a brand’s current market share and perceived quality across U.S. cities. The magnitude of this effect typically drives the rank order of market shares and perceived quality levels across cities.