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.     

Building the <Emphasis Type="Italic">New</Emphasis> New Orleans: Foundation and NGO Power

Most accounts of organized philanthropy’s response to the Katrina disaster portray foundations as either providing critical resources in the absence of federal, state, and municipal leadership, or as mildly ineffective and uncommitted grantmakers with little understanding of local nonprofit and community needs. Through an in-depth case study of the three largest regional foundations and two largest foundations established as a direct response to Hurricane Katrina, I examine the overall role of philanthropy in the post-Katrina New Orleans, including the history, leadership, grantmaking practices, and ideology of the largest and most influential foundations. Far from being saviors in the absence of state leadership, nor bumbling and ineffective grantmakers, it is shown that dominant foundations and major NGOs have proven very effective in leading the local growth coalition’s opportunistic response to the disaster.     

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.     

Differentiating Indexation in Dutch Pension Funds

Funded social security programs are particularly vulnerable to economic and financial market shocks. As a consequence of the recent crisis, a large fraction of the Dutch pension funds had to submit restoration plans for the recovery of their buffers. Such plans will have to rely primarily on a mix of reduced benefit indexation and increased pension contributions. Hence, a discussion has emerged whether indexation should be differentiated across the various groups of participants in a pension fund. We investigate this issue numerically, developing an applied many-generation small open-economy OLG model with heterogeneous agents. The pension system consists of a first-pillar PAYG component and a second pillar with a pension fund. In our stochastic simulations, we hit the economy with a variety of unexpected demographic, economic and financial shocks. We compare uniform indexation of pension rights across all fund participants with alternatives such as status-contingent indexation in which pensions are protected against price inflation. While the aggregate welfare consequences are small, group-specific consequences are more substantial with the workers and future born losing and retirees benefitting from a shift away from uniform indexation. The exception is a scheme which links indexation directly to the fund’s asset performance. Under this scheme the retired benefit without other groups losing. The welfare effects are primarily the result of systematic welfare redistributions rather than of shifts in the benefits of risk sharing. Contribution rates always have to rise substantially from their initial levels to maintain the system’s sustainability. An increase in the retirement age that leaves existing pension rights untouched does little to avoid this rise with its adverse labour market consequences.     

Diversity at the Workplace: Whom Does it Benefit?

We examine whether firms and their employees benefit from age and educational diversity. At the plant level we explain productivity with workforce characteristics. Age diversity is positively and educational diversity negatively related to total factor productivity. These conclusions are robust to using alternative estimators (fixed effects, GMM, and Olley-Pakes approach). Individual gains are evaluated by estimating earnings equations with job match fixed effects. The explanatory variables include individual demographic variables, plant-level workforce characteristics and variables that describe the individuals’ relative position in the age, education, and gender structure of the plant. Plant-level diversity does not have a significant effect on individual wages. However, being different from others in terms of age, i.e. relational demography, is positively related to wage.     

Productivity-Wage Gaps Among Age Groups: Does the ICT Environment Matter?

This paper disentangles the age-productivity-wage nexus by estimating productivity and wage equations with longitudinal employer-employee panel data for Belgium. Results indicate that workers above 49 years are significantly less productive than their younger colleagues. Moreover, while relative productivities across age groups are not found to differ significantly between ICT and non ICT firms, the upward sloping age-wage profile appears to be somewhat steeper in ICT firms. Yet, whatever the ICT environment, findings show that young workers are paid below and older workers above their marginal productivity. This pattern is in line with the deferred payment model developed by Lazear (J Polit Econ 87:1261–1284, 1979).     

Debt to Society: Asset Poverty and Prisoner Reentry

Every year, millions of people exit American jails and prisons and attempt to reintegrate into society. Ex-offenders face many obstacles during the transition. Scholars contend that securing employment is central to a successful transition. A job that allows an ex-offender to earn an income above the poverty line is especially significant, recent studies have shown. Consequently, many prisoner reentry initiatives are focused on expanding employment opportunities for ex-offenders. However, the almost exclusive emphasis on employment as the measurement of economic well-being is short-sighted because it ignores the importance of financial education and asset ownership. Prisoner reentry programs should include an emphasis on financial education in addition to an emphasis on employment as a means of reducing recidivism rates and improving the economic well-being of the ex-offenders and receiving communities. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications.     

Public Housing in New Orleans Post Katrina: The Struggle for Housing as a Human Right

This article reflects on the post-Katrina demolition of public housing communities in New Orleans and associated loss of affordable apartments with a focus on the Columbia Parc redevelopment. Some key issues regarding displacement, race, gender, and public housing policies are referenced throughout. A concluding discussion of advocacy efforts to frame housing as a human right highlights a central, unmet movement demand: one for one replacement of all demolished public housing.     

Regulatory Constraints on Performance-Based Managerial Compensation,Bank Monitoring,and Aggregate Loan Quality

This paper evaluates the effects of binding regulatory restraints on the rate of performance-based management compensation within a banking framework in which a primary function of bank management teams is to monitor loans in order to eliminate deadweight default losses. Available management teams are endowed with heterogeneous levels of monitoring efficiencies, and obtaining services from more efficient monitoring teams requires payment of higher rates of performance-based compensation. In equilibrium, a fraction of banks choose to employ management teams that monitor. With or without binding capital requirements, imposing binding restraints on the allowed rate of performance-based compensation results either in lower bank efficiency or in a reduced fraction of monitoring banks and, hence, lower aggregate loan quality.