A compact but complete handbook of zoning covering the story of the spread of this movement, the reasons for zoning, the experiences of various zoned cities, the correct principles and best practice, the legal pitfalls and a selected list of reference.
EDWARD M. BASSETT was chairman of the Zoning Committee of New York.
Farm labor shortages have become a salient feature of agricultural production in the U.S. Immigrant workers, particularly immigrants from Mexico, play an important role in the agricultural labor force. However, over the past twenty years, there has been a marked decline in new immigrant arrivals from Mexico, suggesting a link between falling Mexican immigration and agricultural labor shortages. Economists Ashish Shenoy and Julián Arteaga will examine the impacts of changes in immigrant labor supply on wages, farm production, and domestic food prices.
While unions played a central role in reducing inequality and shaping political life throughout the twentieth century, they historically drew sharp boundaries between insiders and outsiders – frequently excluding immigrants, Black workers, and women. Economist Carlo Medici will examine how demographic shifts shaped unions’ inclusion of diverse workers and how unions, in turn, impacted immigrant and Black workers’ access to economic and political opportunity. He will analyze archival records and census and electoral data for his project.
In 2021, in response to historic migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, Texas enacted Operation Lone Star, an initiative that transported more than 100,000 migrants from border communities to Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. These transfers were politically driven, largely unanticipated by receiving jurisdictions, and unrelated to local economic conditions. Economists Jose Bucheli and Rhet Smith will examine how these sudden inflows of migrants affected local crime, policing, and public order.
The California Dream Act and CADAA opened access to state Cal Grants for undocumented students who cannot receive federal aid. Using the universe of CADAA applications, this study employs a regression discontinuity design around annual Cal Grant offer cutoffs to estimate intention-to-treat effects of scoring above the threshold on educational outcomes. A fuzzy RDD uses score-relative-to-cutoff as an instrument for actual grant receipt to estimate local average treatment effects.
Truth in Sentencing (TIS) reforms eliminated parole, standardized release dates, and generally lengthened sentences in many states around 1999–2000. This study uses Wisconsin’s TIS implementation (effective December 1999) and a sharp regression discontinuity design around the policy cutoff to estimate causal effects on sentencing length, recidivism, and labor-market reentry for formerly incarcerated people.
Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs aim to promote bilingualism and boost academic and long-run economic outcomes for English learners (ELs) and non-ELs. This project uses longitudinal student-level data from Texas and the staggered rollout of DLI programs across cohorts to estimate causal impacts on short- and long-run outcomes: test scores, high-school graduation, college enrollment and completion, and adult wages.
The H-1B visa cap has been fixed at 85,000 since 2004 while demand for skilled clinicians has risen, potentially affecting where immigrant clinicians work and patient access to care. This project leverages the cap-exempt status of research-affiliated nonprofit hospitals—institutions that can hire without lottery exposure—to create quasi-experimental variation when the cap binds.
To identify causal effects of women’s entry into paid professional work, this project exploits historical teacher certification exams as a quasi-random barrier into one of the early white-collar occupations available to women. By linking teacher-exam records to census data and applying a regression discontinuity design around passing thresholds, the study estimates how access to the teaching profession affected women’s labor-market outcomes, marriage, and fertility.
Many Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) claimants pay for tax preparation services they could obtain free and more accurately through VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance). In Michigan, only 1.4% of EITC returns use VITA while 49% use paid preparers, who often face no competency standards. This study uses a field experiment to understand why low-income households choose paid preparers despite higher costs and error rates, and to test whether targeted information about VITA’s availability, quality, and convenience shifts behavior.
