Municipal

Research on recent immigrants’ social networks and their hunt for work has produced mixed findings. Such networks have been shown to provide job opportunities and raise wages, but they can also aggravate cultural tensions and trigger competition for jobs. A 2012 study from Northwestern University, published in the Review of Economic Studies, suggests that it’s the composition of an immigrant’s social network that determines its impact on his or her employment prospects.

Land use in the United States has always been marked by change — forest has become cropland and then returned again; towns have grown in rural areas only to disappear; cities have grown, suburbs have spread.  In the last 25 years, however, change has accelerated in ways that depart from previous trends, even as the stakes have gotten higher — land use can have real effects on climate change, wildlife habitat and now even energy production.

The push for open government and open data by federal officials, as well as authorities across many states and cities, can seem an unmitigated good. Talk to journalists, however, and there are myriad areas where they believe government at all levels is still being less than transparent — and less than helpful in revealing facts that the public is entitled to know.

From the Scholars Strategy Network, written by Andrea Hetling, Rutgers University.