Russell Sage Foundation

We analyze how the legal enforceability of noncompete agreements (NCAs) affects labor markets.Using newly-constructed panel data, we find that higher NCA enforceability diminishes workers' earnings and job mobility, with larger effects among workers most likely to sign NCAs.These effects are far-reaching: changes in enforceability impose externalities on workers across state borders, suggesting that enforceability broadly affects labor market dynamism.We provide evidence that NCA enforceability primarily affects wages through its effect on workers' outside options; moreover, workers facing high enforceability are unable to leverage tight labor markets to increase earnings.We motivate these findings by embedding NCA enforceability in a search model with bargaining.Finally, higher NCA enforceability exacerbates gender and racial earnings gaps.

Mucinous cysts of the pancreas represent the most common identifiable precursor to pancreatic cancer. Evidence-based guidelines for screening and surveillance exist, but many patients are either not properly identified or lost to follow-up. Artificial Intelligence, specifically computational linguistics models, can dramatically improve patient identification and mitigate risk through modernizing pancreatic cyst longitudinal surveillance. Herein we discuss the risk associated with mucinous cysts of the pancreas and modern approaches to patient identification and follow-up.

This paper analyzes the design of financial regulatory structure in the European Union. We develop a two-pronged approach to track changes in decision-making authority in EU financial market regulations and directives enacted from 1964 to the present. Traditional observational data collection methods manually code laws to identify the amount of discretionary authority delegated to regulatory bodies that oversee segments of financial markets. The lack of robustness and scalability of this approach, however, may limit the generalizability of observational studies. To remedy these potential shortcomings, we match observational methods with data science techniques, in particular natural language processing, to visualize complex patterns in the text of laws and temporal movements. The combination of both observational and computational approaches provides more detailed insights of the various elements of financial regulatory structure and the temporal allocation of decision-making authority among the European Commission, regulatory agencies and the Members States. Our analysis indicates that both the scope and location of decision-making authority shifted over time, moving from Member States to EU regulatory agencies. The amount of discretionary authority delegated to EU agencies to implement regulations, on the other hand, has remained largely unchanged.Issue editors: Françoise Roure and Serge Catoire

This dissertation uses language instruction in Los Angeles as a lens through which to explore assimilation, immigration, and what it means to be an American. It draws from sources such as curricular materials, court records, correspondence, blue book exams, and student newspapers in the city of angels' Anglo, Mexican, and Japanese American communities. They launched language experiments that attracted national attention from 1900 to 1968, the year of the federal Bilingual Education Act and the Chicano Blowouts in East Los Angeles. While many scholars have pointed to those events as crucial moments in the origins of the modern culture wars, they came from a long history of language projects in Los Angeles. In studying that history, this work attempts to answer three questions. How did public schools design language instruction to Americanize foreign-born students before World War II? How did those students respond to Americanization curriculum? Finally, after the war, how did immigrant communities use bilingual education to reshape debates about desegregation and citizenship? These questions were not often addressed in direct discussions between Anglo, Mexican, and Japanese Angelenos. However, telling the stories of colorful characters from each community suggests that language learning played a central role in local and national debates about immigration and education. The dissertation begins in the Progressive Era, when teachers, students, and community members argued about the idea of public schools as Americanization factories that produced assimilated citizens ready for the work force. After Congress imposed national origins quotas in the Immigration Act of 1924, many advocates of foreign-born children challenged the notion that education was a nation-building project and insisted that schools should celebrate their students' native cultures as well. Until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Los Angeles school district and community-run heritage schools stressed language learning in their definitions of citizenship education. This debate shifted during and after World War II, as the national interest in Americanization gave way to new ideas about racial integration. In 1947, a court ruling that stopped a school district in Orange County from segregating Spanish-speaking students on account of language became a precedent for the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. That case was heard in Los Angeles, where judges, officials, and reformers began to think about integrated schools along with another new concept, bilingual education. Since 1960, Angelenos have proposed a range of programs that created controversy leading up to, and after, the Bilingual Education Act and the East L.A. Blowouts of 1968. Taken together, the language projects of the city school district, immigrant educators, and student protestors reflect the coexistence of segregation and inclusive citizenship in Los Angeles schools.

This project aims to answer a critically important question of public policy: Does effective child support enforcement lead to a change in the incidence of abortion across the United States? Using state-level data collected from 1978–2003 from a variety of sources, we employ fixed effects regression analysis to examine whether financial security as measured by five types of child support enforcement effectiveness impacts abortion outcomes. We find that child support enforcement effectiveness decreases the incidence of abortion as measured by the abortion rate, but not the abortion ratio. Income transfer policies such as child support enforcement can affect certain fertility outcomes such as abortion rates across the states.

Augmenter les qualifications des travailleurs, assurer une meilleure adéquation entre offre et demande de compétences et qualifications font dans leur principe consensus. Ils sont amplement mis en œuvre dans les différents pays de l’OCDE, dont la France, qui ont fait des efforts importants notamment pour la formation initiale. Cette communication suggère que ces efforts sont insuffisamment accompagnés de politiques prévenant des gâchis de compétences et de qualifications : prospective efficace des métiers, gestion des cycles de demande, préservation de la santé des travailleurs.

Studies of race differences in psychotic disorders frequently show greater severity among African Americans. An intraracial or cultural analysis of psychotic symptoms was conducted to better understand the racial disparities. Specifically, cultural/racial themes in the delusions and hallucinations of a sample of 156 African American psychiatric patients were examined via content analysis. Cultural/racial themes focusing on general racial issues and racism were identified in the delusions and hallucinations of these patients. The current findings also indicated that delusions were more prevalent and contain more cultural content than hallucinations. Implications for racial differences in psychotic symptom expression are discussed.

Gerald Kramer, Steven Brams, Peter Ordeshook, Samuel Popkin, and I were MIT undergraduates interested in political science in the late 1950s. Kramer, after taking a job at Rochester under the new chairman, William Riker, spent 1966–1967 at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University studying econometrics under Marc Nerlove. He began investigating the question of whether macroeconomic fluctuations had any effect on voting behavior. After discovering, somewhat to his (and Nerlove's) surprise, that there did seem to be some effect, he began exploring the question in depth, developing a more formal theoretical framework and also using several different econometric approaches, which jointly led to this article.