Immigrant Struggles in New Orleans Post-Katrina

Race relations in New Orleans have often been narrowed to Black and white, especially pre-Katrina. According to the 2000 census, the city was about 67% African American, 27% white, 2% Asian, and 3% “Hispanic.” In a city with a deep history of racial tensions between Black and white, other people of color—and especially recent immigrants—often went unmentioned in discussions of city demographics. The city’s world famous culture—whether in the traditions of Mardi Gras Indians and secondline parades, or in music like jazz and bounce—is also famously rooted in specifically African cultures. Even in media coverage of the city post-Katrina, the story of immigrant experiences has remained mostly invisible. When these stories have been told, they have often fit into the old stereotypes of “model minorities” (as in the case of the Vietnamese recovery) or of low-wage workers stealing jobs (as in the case of news reports on the city’s new Latino population). However, the stories of these other New Orleanians offer an important lens through which to view the overall struggle over the city’s recovery. And the work of grassroots activists from these communities, who strived to not only work for justice for their friends and neighbors, but also to build broad multi-racial alliances, provides an inspiring example for people in other cities who are waging similar fights.     

Foreign Investors in The Netherlands: Heterogeneous Employment and Productivity Effects

Recent academic research suggests that the effects of inward foreign direct investment for productivity and employment may vary across foreign investors with different characteristics. Using a newly created dataset that integrates micro-level information from The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency and Statistics Netherlands, this paper explores the role of several of these characteristics, including e.g. the country of origin, activities and tasks, age and strategic role of foreign affiliates in The Netherlands in the 2000–2007 period. Our analysis shows that important employment and productivity differences exist for nearly all these dimensions.     

UK World War I and interwar data for business cycle and growth analysis

This article contributes new time series for studying the UK economy during World War I and the interwar period. The time series are per capita hours worked and average capital income, labor income, and consumption tax rates. Uninterrupted time series of these variables are provided for an annual sample that runs from 1913 to 1938. We highlight the usefulness of these time series with several empirical applications. The per capita hours worked data are used in a growth accounting exercise to measure the contributions of capital, labor, and productivity to output growth. The average tax rates are employed in a Bayesian model averaging experiment to reevaluate the Benjamin and Kochin (J Political Econ 87:441–478, 1979) regression.