We examine the evolution of racial economic inequality using the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW), a comprehensive household income measure that incorporates amount of wealth, taxes and transfers, spending on public goods, and the value of household production. Analyzing shifts in racial inequality for the between benchmark LIMEW years 1959, 1972, 1982, 1989, 2000, 2004 and 2007, we show that reductions in overall racial inequality in the 1960s were sustained through the 1980s, but that in the 1990s there was a marked increase driven by an increase in the concentration of wealth among white households. While spending on education and progressive tax policies helped alleviate racial disparities, transfers have had little impact on racial inequality. We also show that much of the racial inequality is driven by within raceinequality as opposed to between race inequality.

This study tests the impact of household and demographic factors on the economic well-being ofthe farm and nonfarm self-employed using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.Parametric and nonparametric techniques are used to test for statistical differences in selfemploymentand household income levels. Further, household and demographic factors aretested for their effect on self-employment income using a censored tobit regression model. Thefarm self-employed report significantly higher levels of self-employment income. Results revealthat several household and demographic factors significantly impact self-employment incomelevels for the farm and nonfarm self-employed, with key differences in impacts.

Research underscores social engagement in meaningful activities as key to health and well-being, with retirement age Americans at risk of isolation We draw on time-use data from the American Time Use Survey (2003-2006) to examine daily time spent in either paid or unpaid (volunteer) work for 5-year subgroups of American men and women ages 40-70. Some college education and low non-self earned income predict continued employment for older adults, as does being white. Having children still at home and/or caring for an aging relative reduces time spent in paid work for men and women in their 40s, and for women in their 50s. Volunteering predicts less time spent in employment for men in their 40s and 60s, and for women in their 40s and later 50s. Time spent in paid and volunteer work has increased for older Americans from 2003 to 2006. Health (2006 only) predicts more time in volunteering and employment.

Consumption patterns and living standards are relatively neglected in stratification research even though they are important indicators of material well-being. Consumption inequality is related to income and wealth disparities through complex processes not yet well understood. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing a striking shift in the standard of living in housing in the US that occurred at the same time as a substantial increase in income inequality. Houses became significantly bigger in the 1980s and 1990s just as inequalities deepened, reversing an earlier trend towards smaller houses. Diverse theoretical traditions in the consumption and housing stratification literatures explain this shift differently, and in particular posit very different effects of rising income inequality. I derive several alternative expectations from these traditions: two predicting that the increasing size of houses was broadly shared across income levels, while another expects it represented increasing divergence in living standards, paralleling the trend in income inequality. I use US Census and American Housing Survey data and several different methods to adjudicate between these theories. The results provide some support for each of the alternative expectations, but the most significant finding is that big house ownership became more concentrated among the affluent. A focus on living standards thus uncovers a key source of rising disparities at the turn of the 21st century with important implications for wealth stratification too since houses are the major debt and asset held by most Americans.

Children must rely on adults to provide the economic and human resources essential to assure their well-being and development, because it is the adults in their families, communities, and the halls of government who determine the nature and magnitude of resources that reach children (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Haveman & Wolfe, 1994). In view of this dependence of children on adults, this chapter has three main goals. The first is to portray the extent to which children in the United States and other selected rich countries experience limited access to economic resources, compared to the adults in each country. The second is to focus on key family circumstances of children which reflect human resources available in the home and which influence the level of economic resources that parents have available to provide for their children. The third is to draw attention to differences among the race, ethnic, and immigrant groups that are leading the demographic transformation of rich countries around the world.

A large literature in sociology concerns the implications of immigrants participation in ethnicenclaves for their economic and social well-being. In particular, the enclave thesis speculatesthat immigrants benefit from working in ethnic enclaves. Previous research concerning theeffects of enclave participation for immigrants economic outcomes has come to mixedconclusions as to whether enclave effects are positive or negative. In this paper, we seek toextend and improve upon previous work by formulating testable hypotheses based on the enclavethesis and testing them with data from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, employing bothresidence-based and workplace-based measures of the ethnic enclave. We examine the economicoutcomes of immigrants working in ethnic enclaves as compared to those working in themainstream economy. Our research yields minimal support for the enclave thesis. Our resultsfurther indicate that for some immigrant groups, ethnic enclave participation actually has anegative effect on economic outcomes.

This paper empirically assesses the theory of interpersonal income comparison using individual level data on suicide deaths in the United States. We model suicide as a choice variable, conditional on exogenous risk factors, reflecting an individual's assessment of current and expected future utility. Our empirical analysis considers whether suicide risk is systematically related to the income of others, holding own income and other individual factors fixed. We estimate proportional hazards and probit models of the suicide hazard using two separate and independent data sets: (1) the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the Detailed Mortality Files combined with the 5 percent Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with reference group income. This result holds for reference groups defined broadly, such as by county, and more narrowly by county and one demographic marker (e.g., age, sex, race). These findings are robust to alternative specifications and cannot be explained by geographic variation in cost of living, access to emergency medical care, mismeasurement of deaths by suicide, or by bias due to endogeneity of own income. Our results confirm findings using self-reported happiness data and are consistent with models of utility featuring external habit or Keeping Up with the Joneses preferences.Keywords: Relative income, interpersonal comparisons, interdependent preferences, suicide, happiness, Keeping Up with the JonesesJEL Classifications: I31, D6, H0, J0

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act provides a statutory framework for tribal gaming and stipulates that net gaming revenues must be used by tribes to foster economic development. After it was passed in 1988, tribal gaming revenues increased dramatically as did the number of tribal casinos. Using a difference-in-difference methodology with 1990 and 2000 Census data, I examine how the introductions of casinos impact the well-being of on reservation American Indians.In my first two chapters, I use aggregate reservation data. In Chapter 1, I use least squares. Casinos increase per capita income by about 8% and reduce family and child poverty rates by 4 to 5 percentage points. I find the largest casinos are associated with the largest increases in income and reductions in poverty. However, least squares will only be unbiased if the decision to open a casino is uncorrelated with unobservable heterogeneity in reservation per capita income or poverty. In Chapter 2, I control for this potential endogeneity of the casino choice variables by including instrumental variables and find income effects increase 2 to 4% but lose statistical significance. Poverty effects increase in magnitude to 11 to 14 percentage points for family poverty rates and 16 to 20 percentage points for child poverty rates. Hence, these results may mean tribes with fewer outside opportunities open casinos and least squares biases effects downwards. However, after dropping at least one instrument, there are problems with weak identification, income effects decline to almost zero, and poverty impacts are no longer significant but remain large in magnitude.In Chapter 3, I use 1990 and 2000 IPUMS-USA micro-data to examine impacts on household per capita total income, earned income, state and federal assistance income, and poverty according to head of household skill and market size. Casinos impacts are largest on low-skill heads but significance is dependent on the model used. If impacts vary by market size, income effects differ on the measure used and the sex of the head of household. On the other hand, with the exception of female headed families' near poverty rates, poverty rates decline more in larger markets.

The picture of economic well-being is crucially dependent on the yardstick used to measure it. The LIMEW is different in scope from the official US Census Bureau measure of gross money income (MI) in that our measure includes public consumption, income from wealth, and household production. In previous work, Wolff and Zacharias (2007) found that the median U.S. household was much better off in 2001 relative to 1989 according to LIMEW in comparison to MI. They also found that the racial gap widened according to LIMEW, while MI suggested a mild improvement. On the other hand, the hump-shaped relationship between age and economic well-being was not found when the LIMEW is used as the yardstick, due to the higher relative well-being of the elderly. Measured inequality was lower according to LIMEW than gross money income but the increase between 1989 and 2001 was higher for the LIMEW. In the current study, we extend the LIMEW backward in time to 1959. We find that median LIMEW and MI grew at about the same annual rate from 1959 to 2000 but LIMEW grew much slower from 1959 to 1982 and much faster from 1982 to 2000. Second, LIMEW showed a greater increase in inequality from 1959 to 2000 than MI (7.1 versus 5.7 Gini points), and particularly from 1959 to 1982. Third, the racial gap in mean values narrowed from 1959 to 1989 according to both measures but then widened from 1989 to 2000 according to LIMEW but continued to narrow according to MI.

Most of the policy debate about immigration in the United States is about the appropriate amount of immigration and the appropriate policies toward temporary workers and undocumented workers. These are primarily federal policy issues. But state and local policymakers face a different challenge: that of helping immigrants in their regions adjust to life in the United States, especially economic life. As a basis for state and local immigrant incorporation policy, this report will show how immigrants' economic well-being compares across metropolitan areas.

The California Report Card is a yearly report issued by Children Now that presents key indicators health, education, and family well-being, along with an assessment of policy and budget progress for children and families. The 2006-07 Report Card highlights gains made in health insurance coverage, preschool, and afterschool and issues a call to legislators and advocates to continue to pursue pro-child policies statewide.

This briefing paper focuses on the educational and health status of children and families on the California/Mexico border. Guided by input from community activists and local government officials, this briefing paper will present easy-to-understand stats on children and families, supplemented by case studies drawn from the border communities studied.

Report provides community-level data for child and family well-being, including economic, educational, and health elements. We sought to provide up-to-date information about the demographic and lifestyle characteristics of this region while challenging negative stereotypes about residents.

This paper estimates social security financial incentives for early retirement usingcontemporary techniques developed in economics, and compares these estimates to thoseestimated for developed countries. I find that implicit tax on continued work increases withage and amounts to over one-third of an individual potential earnings at age sixty-five. Thepension replacement rate shows the degree of the generosity of the Brazilian pension system,on average pension benefits correspond to 60% of labor income. In general, I find that incentivesinherent to the pension system situate Brazil in the bottom level of developed countries. Thereplacement rates, implicit tax on work and pension accrual rates in Brazil are similar to thelevels observed in the US and Canada.

The United States of America has always been a nation of immigrantsa land of opportunity wherenewcomers can, through hard work and perseverance, achieve better lives for themselves andtheir families. But in todays world, realizing the American Dream is now almost impossible withoutat least some college education, and many immigrants face significant barriers to gaining accessto and succeeding in higher education. Higher education for immigrants isnt an issue narrowlyfocused on the well-being of these immigrants as individuals but has major implications for thenation as whole. As the United States moves into the 21st century as part of a global economy inwhich postsecondary education is a key to economic competitiveness, it is imperative to developpolicies at the federal, state, local, and institutional levels to help immigrants gain access to andsucceed in higher education. Without such policies, the nation may find itself with a workforce thatdoes not have sufficient education to enable the United States to remain economically competitive.

This paper investigates how unauthorized immigrants' illegal status affects their children's scholastic achievement in the U.S. The answer to this question calls attention to the intergenerational consequence of the U.S. immigration legislation. In order to estimate the intergenerational effect of immigration status, two sources of bias need to be overcome: 1) the omitted variables that determine both parental immigration status and children's scholastic performance; and 2) misreporting in legal status among illegal immigrants. The biggest amnesty program in U.S. history (IRCA 1986) and a two-step semi-parametric method are used to estimate the misreporting rate, as well as to recover the treatment effect of truly having legal status. My empirical analysis using the data of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey finds: Had the illegal Latina immigrant women who arrived in the U.S. during 1982-1986 migrated before 1982 and thus been granted legal status by IRCA, their children on average would have improved their math scores by 0.65 of a standard deviation and their reading scores by 0.50 of a standard deviation. The above results account for misreporting. The probability that the potential truly illegal Latina immigrant women misreport their legal status is estimated at around 0.46. This paper also finds that households' economic well-being, residential location, and residential instability are the three main mechanisms through which immigrants' legal status affects their children's scholastic performance. Keywords: Immigrant, legal status, educationJEL Classifications: J18, O15, R23

How much have government programs improved elderly well-being? I examine the impact of OAA on mortality between 1930-1955. I construct two new data sets: a database on OAA, and a database on elderly mortality. To control for the joint determination of income and mortality, I use a simulated IV approach that relies on exogenous changes in OAA legislation. I find substantial reductions in mortality for vulnerable elderly groups, especially poor males. Mortality decreased mainly because of declines in risky behavior, infectious diseases (after the introduction of antibiotics), and suicides. Household survey analyses reveal changes in consumption consistent with these patterns.