Abstract
The advent of rising immigration has spurred research into a number of important issues insofar as the indigenous labor market is concerned. Some of these issues regarding the nature of the effect on native workers have been studied extensively. Others, like the interrelationships among immigration flows, African–American male earnings, employment, and incarceration rates have not been widely examined. In this paper, the association among these non-stationary variables is studied in the framework of a Vector Error Correction model and its associated cointegrating relationship. We find no statistically significant association among immigration, Black male employment rates, and Black male incarceration rates over the period 1961–2008, ceteris paribus.
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Notes
The employment rate is defined as the employment to population ratio.
Bureau of Justice Statistics Correctional Surveys, Correctional Populations in the United States 2008.
See http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba292.html for a review of the minimum wage controversy.
Unit root test results will be made available from the author upon request.
We first tested for the number of lags in the model and according to the results presented at the bottom of Table 1, the lag was one (1).
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This research was supported by a 2007 Summer Research Grant from the Zarb School of Business.
Appendix A
Appendix A
Variable descriptions
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WEARN t —Real Median Weekly Earnings of Black Males Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers
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EMPR t —Employment to Population Ratio of Black Males
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INCR t —Black Incarceration Rate (Per 100 K Population)
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IMMIG t —U.S. Immigration
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BEDUC t —Percentage of Black Males Age 25 or Over Who Have Completed High School or College
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BEN t —Federal and State Real Social Expenditures (Billions of $)
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GDP t —Real Gross Domestic Product (Billions Chained 2000 $)
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MINW t —Real Minimum Wage
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UNION t —Wage and Salary Workers Who Are Union Members as a Percent of Civilian Employment
Note: All data/variables were downloaded from http://www.haverselect.com/dlx/home.htm except for INCR t , IMMIG t and BEDUC t . INCR t was obtained from the Bureau of Justice Correctional Surveys, Correctional Populations in the United States, IMMIG t was downloaded from http://www.dhs.gov/ximgtn/statistics/publications/yearbook.shtm and BEDUC t was downloaded from http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/educ-attn.html.
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Stevans, L.K. The Relationship Among African American Male Earnings, Employment, Incarceration and Immigration in the United States: A Time Series Approach. Rev Black Polit Econ 36, 151–160 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-009-9043-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-009-9043-5