Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America

Notes

Notes Chapter 2 1. Our own analysis shows that Cuba, Colombia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya have minimal property right protection. 2. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) 10,000 investor visas per year are available, which is about 1 percent of all immigrants admitted annually. The SIPP does not identify investors. Chapter 3 1. The definition of wealth here does not include expected Social Security benefits and employer pensions. In my view, studying them separately is more appropriate than combining them with wealth defined here because Social Security and pension, which are large components of wealth, exist conditional on a long stay in the United States and a participation in the mainstream economy. Thus, including Social Security and pension may affect a study of variations in wealth among those who do not meet these conditions. 2. A good source of consumption data is consumer expenditure (CE) but it has a small sample, few years, and little information on immigration. 3. There are many different definitions of liquid assets. For example, Haveman and Wolff (2004) consider either total net worth or financial assets excluding IRAs and pension assets. 4. About 800 Asian-origin households are headed by individuals older than fifty-five to sixty-four. Chapter 4 1. The percentage for native white is not exactly the same as in table 3.1 because table 4.2 uses seven cross-sections of data from 1996 to 2003 and table 3.1 uses eighteen from 1984 to 2003. 2. Note that the majority of Dominican immigrants live in New York City, where real estate is very expensive. 3. Note that this threshold is set for liquid financial wealth, which is different 293 from the sufficient wealth holding status defined previously when the total wealth, including illiquid and quasi-liquid components such as the home and IRAs. 4. Because none of the sample Guatemalan immigrants has an IRA or Keogh account, the adjustment does not make any changes. 5. Some people own a business but do not necessarily operate it. Chapter 5 1. Because of small sample sizes of households with second mortgages within each immigrant group, the negative home equity rates among households with second mortgages are not examined. Chapter 7 1. We take the exponential of this coefficient and then subtract 1 from the resulting value, 100 · (e−1.962 −1)% = 100 · (0.141 − 1)% = −85.9%. For small values (between −0.3 and 0.3) of the estimated coefficient, this is approximately 100β̂%. For coefficients beyond this range, we use the precise formula. 2. In principle, model 3 can be applied to different classes, measured by different education groups. Going along with the attention to wealth gaps among racial-ethnic groups, the following analysis focuses on the separate analysis. for racial-ethnic groups. 3. To obtain this interpretation, I take the first derivative of log positive net worth with respect to age, set this derivative to 0 and solve for the age at which log net worth reaches the maximum: 4. With a cross-section of data, one cannot identify each of the three variables in the linear combination of age = period – birth-year or the linear combination of age-at-arrival = period-at-arrival – birth-year. 5. We can take the log of only positive values. Chapter 8 1. State unemployment rate data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and covers the years from 1984 to 2003. 2. Take the black-white dissimilarity Dwb as an example, which is expressed as D w w b b wb i i i l = ⋅ − ⎛ ⎝ ⎜ ⎞ ⎠ ⎟ ∑ 100 1 2 , age = − − = 0 2245 2 0 0017 66 . ( . ) . 294 Notes where w and b denote the number of whites and blacks living in a MSA, respectively , i is the subscript for census tracts and I is the total number of census tracts in that MSA. The dissimilarity index addresses the evenness dimension of segregation. It ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the most uneven distribution. Usually the index is interpreted as the percentage of one of the two groups that would have to move in order to produce evenness. This interpretation does not preserve tract densities and is asymmetric, considering only one group’s move. A more sensible interpretation is that the index is the sum of the minimal percentage of each group that has to move across...