State and local governments have been facing an extraordinarily difficult fiscal environment in recent years. One of many challenges has been restoring public pension plans to a sound fiscal footing after the economic crisis of 2007-09. States have begun to respond by enacting a mix of revenue increases and benefit cuts. These changes will, over time, improve the financial outlook for plans and help ease their impact on other budget priorities. This study analyzes the nature and magnitude of these effects by analyzing pension costs before the financial crisis, after the financial crisis, and after reforms for a sample of 32 plans in 15 states. The results show that most of the sample plans responded with significant pension reforms, generally increasing employee contributions and lowering benefits for new employees; the changes were largest for plans with serious underfunding and those with generous benefits; in most cases, reforms fully offset or more than offset the impact of the financial crisis on the sponsors’ annual required contribution; and employer contributions to accruing benefits for new employees were cut in half, sharply lowering compensation for future workers. In short, states have made more changes than commonly thought. Whether these changes stick or not is an open question.

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants' location choices in the U.S. respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, and that this geographic elasticity helps equalize spatial differences in labor market outcomes for low-skilled native workers, who are much less responsive. We leverage the wage rigidity that occurred during Great Recession to identify the severity of local downturns, and our results confirm the standard finding that high-skilled populations are quite geographically responsive to employment opportunities while low-skilled populations are much less so. However, low-skilled immigrants, primarily those from Mexico, respond even more strongly than high-skilled native-born workers. These results are robust to a wide variety of controls, a pre-recession falsication test, and two instrumental variables strategies. A novel empirical test reveals that natives living in cities with a substantial Mexican-born population are insulated from the effects of local labor demand shocks compared to those in cities with few Mexicans. The reallocation of the Mexican-born workforce among these cities reduced the incidence of local demand shocks on low-skilled natives' employment outcomes by more than 40 percent.