Conventional wisdom holds that interregional migration of labor is a stabilizing mechanism for unemployment and wages. For example, labor supply will increase in a high-wage region, as people migrate into that region seeking better compensation; this pushes down wages in the receiving region. However, less often noted is the idea that in-migration may also raise the demand for labor. High rates of population growth will spur demand for housing, infrastructure, services, and other durable nontradables. This increase in demand can, in the short and moderate run, be greater than the increase in supply, which spurs accelerating waves of further in-migration to fill those demands. I focus on this aspect of labor migration, and hypothesize that in the United States from 2000 onwards, both new residential construction and thus the demand for labor in rapidly growing U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) were significantly and positively affected by in-migration; additionally, I posit that MSAs with higher in-migration during the decade were more severely impacted once migration stopped. I statistically test these hypotheses, adapting a study by Gonzalez and Ortega on the impact of international migration on Spanish regional economies over the last decade. My regression models, estimating the change in housing prices and change in residential construction in response to migration, add insights from urban economics and investment accelerator theory to the factors used in the Spanish study. I then test these models using data calculated or obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service. The central question I seek to answer is whether, in the short to medium run, migration is a stabilizing or destabilizing factor in regional labor markets.

How domestic tasks are shared among household members is an important issue because the time women spent on housework translates to time spent not acquiring valuable skills and experience that enhance aspects of women’s lives which are external to the family such as their career and political involvement. This paper studies the effects of the distribution of intra-household bargaining power on families’ time allocation using cooperative bargaining model. I hypothesize that the wife’s time spent doing domestic chores is directly proportional to her relative bargaining power in the family. I test this hypothesis using instrumental variable approach —I exploit the enactment of equitable distribution of marital property in Florida in 1988 as a natural experiment which redistributes bargaining power while holding household’s preference and price constant. This method overcomes the problem of simultaneous causal relationship between family’s time allocation and household’s characteristics such as wife’s wage. Prior to the law enactment, marital property was divided according to the name on the property title which is disadvantageous to women who generally earn less than their husbands. Thus, the enactment of equitable distribution of property in divorce increases women’s bargaining powers by improving their prospects outside marriage. They can use the ‘threat’ of leaving the marriage as leverage when negotiating with their partners to do less housework. Other literature which studies the intra-household bargaining process focuses on the effects of a shift in bargaining power on married women’s labor supply and family’s expenditure on physical goods such as clothing. Instead of replicating previous research, I instead examine the effects of a change in the bargaining position of each spouse on their allocation of non-market labor time. I anticipate that after the enactment of equitable distribution of marital property statute, the allocation of household chores between the partners becomes more equal.

Governments can manipulate reports of the inflation rate to hide economic problems, and to generate revenues from the hidden depreciation of their liabilities valued in domestic currency. However, such practices are unpopular and generally short-lived because citizens soon recognize the loss in their purchasing power. Previously, I constructed an alternative price index for 2006 to 2008 and found that the National Statistics and Censuses Institute underreported the official inflation rate since February 2007. My data, used in conjunction with other alternative indexes, showed that the reported Consumer Price Index (CPI) only accounted for between a half and a third of the real inflation rate. This project explores effects of underreporting inflation in Argentina, and provides further evidence to support the existence of manipulation in the official statistics reports. Using the alternative price indexes, I estimated government gains from domestic bonds and the social security system due to the misreported inflation rates since the manipulation began. By reporting a CPI that is lower than the real one, the government was able to finance its expenditures at a decreasing real cost, at the expense of private investors and citizens. My preliminary results show that the Argentinian government profited in real terms from issuing bonds, and maintained a moderately low budget deficit despite increasing the number of social security beneficiaries. I also studied the national accounts and central bank publications of the last decade and observed a surprisingly high rate of nominal growth beginning in 2007. I will demonstrate that this unexpected rise can be explained by the discrepancy between the reported and the real inflation rate. Since 2009, the Argentinian government has actively censored independent domestic studies on the official CPI, so for the time being, it is essential for foreign scholars to research and keep track of Argentina’s deteriorating statistics.

Income inequality and level of education affects countries across the world. Within the last few years, Thailand’s income inequality seems to have worsened, as is seen from many political conflicts created from the significant gap between the rich and poor.  From the World Bank Poverty Analysis, there has been a dramatic decline of poverty in Thailand since early 1960’s.   However, the decline in poverty was not uniform across regions of the country; poverty is more concentrated in the rural areas.   Therefore, the increase in inequality was also not uniform across the country; the wider income differentials between households in different locations accounted for the increase in overall income inequality.  This means educational attainment plays an important role for labor to make a transition from the old sector to the new sector, and thus is one of the determined factors for income inequality.  In this paper, I will examine the impact of education and skills owned by individual on wage and income distribution of Thailand.  First, I will explain about the previous research on the relationship between education, skills, and wage. Then, I will explain about the data set and the methodology that will be used. Lastly, I will present and explain the result using Mincer's wage regression analysis and give the conclusion.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Lower Ninth Ward community of New Orleans, Louisiana. Eight years later, New Orleans has yet to fully recover from the destruction of Katrina. However, in 2012, New York advertising agency, GLU, partnered with New Orleans native Lil' Wayne and Mountain Dew to construct a community skatepark, branded the "DEWeezy Skatepark." The park is meant to act as a central hub for community members, promoting community cohesion, encouraging futher development, and providing a unique environment for youth to build character through the medium of sports. The purpose of this proposal will be to evaluate whether or not corporate and celebrity partners were successful in their efforts to bring "rebirth" to this devastated community. Both positivist logical and participatory frameworks will be considered as methods for evaluation. If research supports the DEWeezy skatepark as a success, the model could be replicated in other devastated communities as a method for development.