Authorized by Congress in 1996 as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 287(g) agreements authorize local enforcement agencies (LEAs) to carry out federal immigration enforcement functions. There are two main models. Under the Jail Enforcement Officer model, enforcement occurs at the jail, after individuals have been arrested by the LEA for non-immigration criminal offenses.
Whether immigration increases crime remains a much-debated question. Sociologists and criminologists have suggested that immigration has not increased crime since 1960, when larger waves of immigrants began to enter the U.S. Economists have recently entered this debate and are seeking to produce causal estimates of this relationship. Economic historian Rowena Gray will examine the extent to which immigration increased crime in an earlier era of heavy immigration.
Noncompete Agreements (NCAs) contractually limit a worker’s ability to accept a new job with a competitor of his or her current employer. By restricting workers’ mobility across employers, current employers may be more willing to invest in training or to impart trade secrets without fear that their workers will transfer the benefits of those assets to competitors.
Much of the research on non-standard forms of employment has analyzed individual data from household surveys or tax forms. Key questions have included measurement of the size of non-standard versus standard employment relationships and the quality of non-standard work, for instance whether temporary employment can function as a “stepping stone” to permanent jobs.
How skills and training can be improved to enhance the job prospects of low-wage workers remains an important issue. Conservatives have argued that job training is ineffective, whereas progressives have focused on raising earnings through changes in labor market standards—minimum and living wages and efforts to revitalize employment law by addressing issues such as mis-classification and outsourcing. Economist Paul Osterman will write a book that examines training programs for low-wage workers.
The General Social Survey has consistently found in four national surveys since 2002 that about a fifth of U.S. adult workers report having employee equity in the companies where they are employed. Existing studies also find that employee owners generally have lower turnover and absenteeism, more company pride and loyalty, greater willingness to work hard, greater access to information and participation in decision making, and more control over their work-life balance. There is also evidence that employee share ownership is associated with higher market-level pay and benefits.
Additive manufacturing technology, also known as 3D printing, emerged in the 1980s, but during the past decade the use of additive manufacturing in production of parts and finished goods has grown rapidly. This emerging technology is expected to transform the location of production, supply chains, transportation systems, the look and feel of products, and organizations. Economists Avner Ben-Ner and Ainhoa Urtasun-Alonso will examine differences in tasks and skills of core production employees—engineers, technicians and operators—in additive manufacturing and traditional manufacturing jobs.
Recent studies have found that transferring income to disadvantaged families improves outcomes for children, including cognitive development, socio‐behavioral development, and educational attainment. For example, an extra $1000 from the Earned Income Tax Credit has been shown to improve child test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation. However, one income source that has received little attention are Social Security benefits, for which the number of child beneficiaries has been increasing.
The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program is HUD’s largest low-income housing subsidy program, aiding 2.2 million households. It provides subsidies for renting units on the private market, with the goal of improving access to stable, affordable housing and neighborhoods that have greater opportunities for upward mobility. However, the program too often fails to provide recipients with meaningful choices in housing and neighborhoods, and many recipients cannot find a landlord who will accept their vouchers.
Many researchers and policymakers have expressed concerns that new technologies will lower the effective cost of capital and lead firms to replace workers with machines, especially those with limited skills. Will increasing capital accumulation increase inequality between skilled and unskilled workers? Does capital investment increase employment or leads firms to substitute between capital and labor? Suárez Serrato, Curtis and Ohrn will study the effects of capital investments on worker outcomes.