We use data on Latino children in the United States who have been randomly assigned calculation tests in English or Spanish to check for the so-called bilingual advantage, the notion that knowing more than one language improves individuals’ other cognitive skills. After controlling for different characteristics of children and their parents, as well as children's time in the US, we find a bilingual advantage among children who read or write in English and Spanish but not for those who only speak or understand both languages. In particular, bilingual readers or writers perform one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation better than monolingual children, equal to learning gains of an additional school year. Applying the Oster test, we find that selection on unobservables would need to be 3–4 times stronger than selection on observables to explain away our results. The bilingual advantage is stronger among children in two-parent households with siblings and for those at the upper end of the ability distribution.

In this study, we report experimental results on the dictator decision collected in two neighboring ethnic minority groups, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, in southwestern China. We follow the double-blind protocol as in Eckel and Grossman (in Handbook of experimental economics results, 1998), who find that women in the U.S. donate more than men. We find this pattern reversed in the Mosuo society and find no gender difference in the Yi society. This is highly suggestive that societal factors play an important role in shaping the gender differences in pro-social behavior such as dictator giving.

“Si él lo necesita” (if he really needs it) was the most common argument given by the subjects who accepted the zero offer in the ultimatum game (strategy method) during experiments conducted among illiterate (adult) gypsies in Vallecas, Madrid. Interestingly the acceptance of the zero offer was not a rare case but, in contrast, was the modal value. This is even more remarkable if we consider that the 97% of the subjects proposed the equal split.

Some Americans prepare for unanticipated adverse economic events, plan for the future, and keep their debt at manageable levels, but others do not. Using four waves of the Understanding America Study during the pandemic period, we compare middle-aged and older Black, Hispanic, and White Americans’ financial resilience from 2020 to 2024. After uncovering significant initial differences in their financial preparedness at the outset of the pandemic, we confirm that greater financial resilience enhanced peoples’ chances of realizing better economic outcomes when confronting adverse economic shocks. The 2024 wave shows systematic differences in financial resilience across the demographic groups and indicates how greater resilience affects financial satisfaction.

Patient navigation (PN) is increasingly used to help people overcome barriers to accessing health care. In a recent trial, PN was added to motivational interviewing (MI) to help patients discharged from detoxification (detox) transition to follow-up care. The goal was to test whether PN in addition to MI increased transition rates and reduced subsequent readmissions into detox compared with MI alone. Results demonstrated little evidence of a treatment effect on either of these two outcomes, but post hoc exploratory analyses showed that patients who received PN were less likely to be arrested in the year following discharge than patients who did not receive PN. In addition, the group that received PN had fewer multiple arrests resulting in a lower average number of arrests per person. These findings are hypothesis-generating and need replication for conclusive inference. Nevertheless, economic analysis indicates that PN after detox could be a cost-beneficial intervention to reduce arrests among a population at high risk for involvement in the criminal justice system.

The USDA has implemented policies to address inequities for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers. This research examines agricultural risk inequities and the impact of 2018 Farm Bill programs on crop insurance use among minority and veteran farmers. Results indicate that minority and veteran farmers are disproportionately located in regions of the U.S. with higher risks of drought and excess precipitation. Yet, these producer groups had lower use of crop insurance prior to the implementation of the 2018 Farm Bill. However, the incentive programs created under the 2018 Farm Bill have increased use of federal crop insurance among these vulnerable populations.

We study the effect of an immigration ban on the self-selection of immigrants along cultural traits, and the transmission of these traits to the second generation. We show theoretically that restricting immigration incentivizes to settle abroad individuals with higher attachment to their origin culture, who, under free mobility, would rather choose circular migration. Once abroad, these individuals tend to convey their cultural traits to their children. As a consequence, restrictive immigration policies can foster the diffusion of cultural traits across boundaries and generations. We focus on religiosity, which is one of the most persistent and distinctive cultural traits, and exploit the 1973 immigration ban in West Germany (Anwerbestopp) as a natural experiment. Through a diff-in-diff analysis, we find that second generations born to parents treated by the Anwerbestopp show higher religiosity.

In this paper, we introduce a unique dataset derived from a survey conducted among 450 Syrian refugee workers and the owners/managers of the firms in which they are employed in Istanbul, Turkey. We utilise this data to investigate the connection between the wage-productivity gap and perceived economic and social discrimination. The findings of the study indicate that individuals facing a wider wage-productivity gap tend to report higher levels of economic and social discrimination. These results remain consistent even after incorporating various variables at both the worker and firm levels into the analysis. These findings imply potential policy recommendations that policymakers should take into account.

The introduction of the 2012 Labour Code is considered ‘groundbreaking’ in industrial relations in Vietnam. However, knowledge about the effects of this law is still minimal. This study provides the first evidence of the impacts of the law on worker outcomes, disaggregated by location and migration status. The Vietnam Labour Force Survey is used as the primary dataset. Both difference-in-differences and fixed-effect models are applied in the investigation. The estimated results show a relationship between the introduction of the law and the labour supply of contracted workers in urban areas, especially long-term migrant workers. Furthermore, income for these long-term migrant contract workers was affected significantly by the introduction of the law. A link between the law and health insurance participation was also found among non-migrant contracted workers in urban areas. We also perform estimations using a short panel sample and find notable results. The study likewise reveals disadvantages of rural workers compared to urban workers in terms of earnings, and of short-term migrants compared to other workers, in terms of labour supply.

This study is a reconsideration of a theme, connecting The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, namely the interplay between moral sentiments and self-interest. Two aspects of the theme are examined. The first consists of an interpretation of the so-called ‘das Adam Smith Problem’, an issue originally pointed out by nineteenth-century German scholars. The second, building on the insight of Smith on the association of shame and poverty, reports on recent research that seeks to examine how emotions impact the perception of economic interests and behaviour in marginalized groups.

Border management is a government activity affecting immigration and the economy. Benefit–cost and equivalent decision analyses are used to evaluate U.S. border management for 2017. Controversial issues arise. Among these are the issue of standing and the values of asylum, a criminal career, child custodial care, foreign deaths, fiscal and labor market effects, and distributional weighting. Sixteen unique shadow prices (imputed marginal value) are computed. Those shadow pries are combined with proportions and levels of border management outcomes. The aggregate result is not only a large expected present value net benefit per year from managed outcomes of $46.6 billion but also a large residual unmanaged annual cost of $23.7 billion. Significant uncertainty exists, but estimated net benefits remain positive.

Recent research has identified a substantial increase in Indigenous mainstream employment since the mid-1990s, but there has been relatively little regional analysis of such employment. The aim of this article is to build on this previous research using the 2006 and 2011 censuses to provide a more disaggregated descriptive analysis of changes in the character of labour market outcomes for Indigenous Australians aged 15–64 years. One of the new findings in the article is that the employment of Indigenous youth (i.e. those aged 15–24 years) in remote areas is different from that of Indigenous youth in non-remote areas, but older Indigenous residents of such areas are not very different in employment terms. Policy-makers thus need to pay particular attention to Indigenous youth employment in remote areas because the failure to address these differentials may lead to a foreclosure of future labour market options. Policy also needs to facilitate Indigenous engagement in the mainstream economy by assisting Indigenous people to be work-ready, especially in ensuring that Indigenous skills are matched with employer demands, and expediting employment by informing businesses on how to provide an Indigenous-friendly workplace.

Research about the demand for Indigenous labour and the relationship of Indigenous workers to their employers is relatively scarce. Even less is known about Indigenous businesses. Supply Nation defines an Indigenous business as those where Indigenous stakeholders hold majority equity, but some researchers have argued that this definition could be relaxed to include businesses in which Indigenous people hold only half the equity in the enterprise. This article uses data from the Industry Capability Network Queensland, which has collected basic business information on a large number of businesses operating in Queensland. The findings reveal that Indigenous businesses have substantially better outcomes for Indigenous employment than non-Indigenous businesses – a result that holds even when the definition of Indigenous business is relaxed. The article also documents how Indigenous employment is concentrated in larger businesses, in particular industry sectors. Non-Indigenous micro-businesses employ relatively few Indigenous workers, and future research can usefully explore why this is the case. To understand the issues involved, it will be necessary to collect multi-level data that link detailed information on employers and employees (including a substantial sample of Indigenous workers).

This article brings together labour relations, sociological and political perspectives on precarious employment in Australia, identifying local contexts of insecurity and setting them within the economics of regional supply chains involving the use of migrant labour. In developing the concept of precarious work-societies, it argues that precarity is a source of individual and social vulnerability and distress, affecting family, housing and communal security. The concept of depoliticisation is used to describe the processes of displacement, whereby the social consequences of precarious work come to be seen as beyond the reach of agency. Using evidence from social attitudes surveys, we explore links between the resulting sense of political marginalisation and hostility to immigrants. Re-politicisation strategies will need to lay bare the common basis of shared experiences of insecurity and explore ways of integrating precarious workers into new community and global alliances.

The study of temporary skilled migration in Australia is relatively new. As a rapidly emerging source of labour and settlers for Australia’s immigration programme, temporary skilled migration will have a major and potentially long-lasting impact on Australia. Since the mid-1990s, temporary skilled migration (under the subclass 457 visa programme) has overtaken permanent migration to Australia. India is now the largest and fastest growing source of temporary skilled migrants. This is a major new development in Australian migration history; yet, to date, there has been little qualitative research into the subjective experiences, motivations and settlement patterns of Indian temporary skilled migrants in Australia, from the perspective of the migrant. This article presents findings from a 3-year qualitative study on the experiences of temporary skilled migrants from India living and working in Australia. It argues that many of the quantitative studies on this topic fail to offer a nuanced reading of these workers’ experiences in Australia, in particular, their situations of vulnerability engendered by the recruitment process, visa conditions, unlawful employment practices and living arrangements.

This article reports a research finding that lesbians in Australia earn an unexplained wage premium of 0%–13%, whereas gay men experience an unexplained negative wage gap of 8%–18%. Based on data from the Australian household panel Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, the article is the first to establish these gaps in Australia, and to examine the degree to which credence can be afforded to claims that endowments such as personality traits may help explain such wage differentials. Using ordinary least squares and Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition methods, the study explicitly includes the battery of Big Five personality traits in wage regressions and estimates the contribution of endowments and returns to these traits. The finding is that personality traits and returns to them do not differ along lines of sexual orientation. Gay men in particular suffer a substantial unexplained wage penalty in the workplace. Such unexplained differences suggest that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, though unlawful, may exist in Australia.

Temporary migrant workers are widely regarded as a precarious group of workers. This precariousness is often traced back to the sphere of employment, though recent research also points to the implications of the limited rights entailed by temporary migrant status. This article draws on empirical work among registered nurses who have participated in the Australian 457 visa scheme – the major programme for temporary migrant workers in Australia. Using a range of empirical sources, including in-depth interviews with 26 temporary migrant nurses, we examine whether these nurses experience precariousness and locate the sites and sources of precariousness. The article draws attention to the importance of the regulatory context that defines different pathways from the country of departure to employment in the Australian healthcare system. We suggest that, although temporary migrant nurses are well integrated within the healthcare workforce in terms of formal wages and conditions, other stages in their migration pathways can be associated with precariousness. This in turn has significant impact on experiences at work and outside the workplace.

State Medical Aid is a public health insurance program that allows undocumented immigrants with low financial resources to access health care services for free. However, the low take-up rate of this program might threaten its efficiency. The purpose of this study is therefore to provide the determinants of such a low take-up rate. To this end, we rely on the Premier Pas survey. This is an original representative sample of undocumented immigrants attending places of assistance to vulnerable populations in France. Determinants of State Medical Aid take-up are analyzed through probit and Cox modeling. The results show that only 51% of those who are eligible for the State Medical Aid program are actually covered, and this proportion is higher among women than among men. The length of stay in France is the most important determinant of take-up. It is worth noting that State Medical Aid take-up is not associated with chronic diseases or functional limitations and is negatively associated with poor mental health. There is, therefore, mixed evidence of health selection into the program. Informational barriers and vulnerabilities experienced by undocumented immigrants are likely to explain this low take-up.

Large migrant inflows have spurred anti-immigrant sentiment, but can small inflows have a different impact? We exploit the redistribution of migrants after the dismantling of the “Calais Jungle” in France to study the impact of the exposure to few migrants, which we estimate using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables. We find that in the presence of a migrant center (CAO), the growth rate of vote shares for the main far-right party (Front National (FN), our proxy for anti-immigrant sentiment) between 2012 and 2017 is reduced by about 12 percentage points. This effect, which crucially depends on the inflow's size, points toward the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954).

This paper is the first to study the effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 on marriage rates between foreign-born individuals and natural-born citizens. Using marriage license data, I find that gains to marriages involving a native bride and foreign groom decrease by 0.2 log points. The decrease in is driven by reductions in gains to marriages involving a Mexican groom or a non-Canadian, non-Mexican groom. I do not find evidence that the effects differed for states with lower educational attainment or higher shares of illegal immigrants.