Cordelia Reimers

Labor Market Effects of September 11th on Arab and Muslim Residents of the United States

We investigated whether the September 11, 2001 terrorists’ attacks had any effect on employment, earnings, and residential mobility of first- and second-generation Arab and Muslim men in the United States. We find that September 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of Arab and Muslim men, but was associated with a 9-11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings, with some evidence that this decline was temporary. The adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence. Estimates also suggest that the terrorists’ attacks reduced intrastate migration of Arab and Muslim men.

The Perceived Budget Constraint under Social Security: Evidence from Reentry Behavior

If, as is usually assumed, older individuals face a continuous choice of work hours without fixed costs or take account of the actuarial adjustment of Social Security benefits postponed as a result of the earnings test, the earnings limit should not affect their labor supply before age 65. We test, and reject, these assumptions by estimating the hazard function for labor market reentry after retirement, using white men in the Retirement History Survey. We find that the earnings limit does affect reentry and that older men behave myopically, responding to current benefits rather than to Social Security wealth. Several policy implications follow.

Making Do and Getting By: Non‐Market Work and Elderly Women's Standards of Living in the United States

We use pooled data from the 2003, 2004, and 2005 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) to explore the impact of non‐market household work on the living standards of the elderly. We describe how women and men allocate their time after they reach age 55 by race/ethnicity, age, and household structure. Focusing on those aged 55–64 and 65–74, we examine white, Black, and Hispanic differences in time use by gender, and compare women and men living alone and only with a spouse or cohabiter. Finally, we impute the replacement‐cost value of non‐market household work and its effect on standards of living of elderly women and men who live alone and elderly married couples. We find that older people reduce their paid work and increase their leisure time considerably, but non‐market work in ones own household increases only slightly at retirement. Time devoted to direct care of others in the household is small compared to indirect care activities such as housework and shopping. Older women devote more time than older men to non‐market work in their own household and spend less time than men in leisure pursuits, whether they are married or living alone. Elderly women who live alone generally enjoy more leisure time than older married women. Adding the value of non‐market work to money income has a modest equalizing effect on gender differences among persons living alone because women have less money income than men, but perform more unpaid work in their own households.

Tax structure and revenue instability: the Great Recession and the states

The Great Recession had the most severe impact on state tax revenues of any downturn since the Great Depression. We hypothesize that states with more progressive tax structures are more vulnerable to economic downturns, and that progressivity and income volatility may interact to amplify the recession’s fiscal impact. We find that, while potential revenue exposure is greater in more progressive states, the most important source of variation was differences in income concentration and capital gains shares in the top 5 percent of taxpayers. Though the interaction between income volatility and high tax burdens at the top did produce large decreases in tax revenue in a few states, tax progressivity accounted for little of the overall interstate variation in revenue volatility.JEL codesH24; H71

The Retirement Process in the United States: Mobility Among Full-Time Work, Partial Retirement, and Full Retirement

The older American male’s long-term trend toward withdrawal from the labor force has continued into the 1980’s, though at a decelerating rate. At all ages over 57, male labor force participation during a year dropped by 3–4 percentage points from 1977 to 1982; whereas in the preceding 5 years it had dropped by 7–12 percentage points. While 87 percent of 55–57 year olds still worked sometime during 1982, the dropoff with advancing age was steep; only 60 percent of 62–64 year olds and 25 percent of 68–73 year olds worked at all in that year. The decline in participation from 1977 to 1982 by men over 65 came entirely at the expense of part-time work; the small fractions working substantially full-time remained stable. On the other hand, men aged 62–64 moved out of both full-time and part-time work; while men under age 62 shifted into part-time out of full-time work.2)

Hispanic Employment in the Public Sector

Government jobs have traditionally been viewed as “good” ones—more secure and with better fringe benefits, if not better paid, than jobs in the private sector that require similar levels of skill. Thus, they are potentially an important avenue for the economic advancement of minorities. Moreover, public-sector opportunities have been enhanced by the rapid expansion in the absolute and in the relative size of the public sector since World War II. Growth in total employment has been particularly rapid at the state and local levels. Although this growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, the shift of resources toward the public sector suggests that public employment would have been an important source of new jobs for all groups, even if hiring, promotion, and compensation patterns by race and gender were the same in the public and in the private sectors. Previous research indicates, however, that governments have been more “open” to blacks and women than have private firms. These groups have a higher percentage employed in the public sector, and a higher percentage in public-sector professional and managerial occupations, than do white men; moreover, blacks and women earn more for given human capital characteristics in the public sector than they do in the private sector (Reimers, 1985; Smith, 1977).

Consumption Taxes, Income Taxes, and Revenue Sensitivity: States and the Great Recession

This article uses an income-distributional approach to state tax sensitivity to examine the assumption that consumption taxes are more stable than income taxes. We estimate the 2007 to 2009 change in tax revenues as a function of state income distributions and tax burdens by income class. We estimate tax burdens as a function of income tax shares and consumption tax shares. We then simulate the change in tax revenues with tax shares at the national average. If high-income-tax states were to lower their reliance on this tax, the revenue decline during the recession would have been greater. For high consumption tax states, the revenue decline under higher income tax shares would have been smaller. Had they shifted toward consumption taxes, income tax reliant states would not have reduced the cyclical sensitivity of tax revenues during the Great Recession. The interaction between tax burdens and recession shocks by income class is key to these results.

Gender, Ethnicity and Employment: Non-English Speaking Background Migrant Women in Australia, by Rowshan Haque and M. Ohidul Haque. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2008. 220 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-7908-1999-1 (hbk.). US

This book analyzes the likelihood of three labor market outcomes – labor force participation, employment in the primary sector, and unemployment – for immigrant women from non–English-speaking countries (‘‘NESB women’’), and compares them with women born in Australia. It will primarily interest scholars who study immigration, gender, and labor markets. While the data and specific findings relate to Australia, the questions addressed and explanatory models apply to developed countries in general. The authors’ major innovations include the analysis of primary-sector versus secondary-sector employment and the bivariate analysis of joint outcomes: labor force participation and sector of employment or labor force participation and unemployment. They also provide an extensive survey of other studies of labor market outcomes for immigrant women in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. Readers will find the lists of articles in Tables 2.1–2.3 useful for identifying studies they may have missed. The authors comment on how their results compare with those of others but do not attempt to explain differences or evaluate the other studies. The analysis begins by estimating a univariate probit model for each labor market outcome for each nativity group. The authors use BOOK REVIEWS