Gender-typical educational choices and lower rates of earnings growth, or the "glass ceiling," are widely believed to explain why older women earn far less than observably similar men. Using panels of college-educated workers from the 1990s, I search for differential growth rates predicted by both human capital and discrimination models. To the contrary, this study finds similar average rates of earnings growth for women and men across numerous specifications, suggesting that the gender gap in earnings is determined by factors already present early in the career; however, changes in educational choices explain only a tiny fraction of between-cohort narrowing of the gender gap. Further exploration reveals slower earnings growth by women within two groups: The first is young mothers, who experience slower earnings growth during the early career relative to men the same age, but then more than compensate with faster growth later in their careers. The second is the group of women with exceptionally high earnings levels; relative to men the same age with similarly high levels of attainment, women are underrepresented among workers winning the largest promotions. This phenomenon affects a very small, but potentially influential, subset of women facing a glass ceiling at the very top of the career ladder.

Although economic theory predicts an inverse relation between relative wages and immigration-induced supply shifts, it has been difficult to document such effects. The weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in a commonly used measure of the supply shift, the immigrant share of the workforce. After controlling for permanent factors that determine wages in specific labor markets,little variation remains in the immigrant share. We find significant sampling error in this measure of supply shifts in Canadian and U.S. census data. Correcting for the resulting attenuation bias can substantially increase existing estimates of the wage impact of immigration.

Does it matter that most politicians in the United States come from more privileged backgrounds than the citizens they represent? Although journalists, policymakers, and political observers have discussed this question throughout our nation's history, scholars of elite decision making have never systematically examined the relationship between policy outcomes and the social class composition of America's political institutions. In this essay, I show that the class backgrounds of officeholders have important consequences. Using composite economic roll call scores, original biographical data on the five most recent Congresses, and less detailed data on other postwar Congresses, I find that -unlike ordinary citizens- legislators from higher-paying or more prestigious occupations exhibit greater support for conservative economic policies. These analyses provide the first evidence of a link between the descriptive and substantive representation of social classes and highlight an understudied source of inequalities in political influence in the United States.

Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act substantially increased federal aid for education, with the goal of expanding educational opportunity. Combining the timing of the programs introduction with variation in its intensity, we find that Title I increased school spending by 46 cents on the dollar in the average school district in the South and increased spending nearly dollar-for-dollar in Southern districts with little scope for local offset. Based on this differential fiscal response, we find that increases in school budgets from Title I decreased high school dropout rates for whites, but not blacks.

Utilizing existing research and survey-based data from several studies, this article places the growth of the Mexican origin population in North Carolina in context and shows how it emerged out of historical, social, and economic connections between the U.S. and Mexico. During the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the privatization of the Mexican ejido system promoted the migration of Mexicans to the U.S. Changes in the ease and cost of migration due to the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA86) helped to sustain this flow of immigrants and led them to settle more permanently in the U.S. during the 1990s. IRCA86s effect on the supply of low-skilled workers in historical gateways states and the rise of anti-immigrant hostility in these states also helped to redirect Mexican migration flows to emerging gateway states. Finally, historical labor market connections between Mexico and the U.S. South, active recruitment of Mexican agricultural workers, and manufacturers courtships of Mexican laborers help to explain the settlement of immigrants in North Carolina during the 1990s and 2000s.

La historia nos enseña que los procesos migratorios son reversibles. Los países de inmigración pueden convertirse en países emisores y los países que tradicionalmente enviaban migrantes pueden convertirse en receptores. Esto ha sucedido en algunos países de Europa y ahora sucede en América Latina. En el último medio siglo América Latina y el Caribe (alc) han dejado de ser un lugar de destino atractivo para los inmigrantes de Europa, Oriente y Medio Oriente, y se han convertido en un actor emergente como emisor de migrantes en la esfera internacional.

Does limited access to credit explain some of the gap in schooling attainment between children from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question using data from two loan programs for college students in Chile. Both programs o?er loans to students who score above a threshold on the national college admission test, providing the basis for a regression discontinuity evaluation design. I ?nd that students from relatively poor families who score just above the cuto? have nearly 20 percentage points higher enrollment than students who score just below the cuto?. Access to the loan program e?ectively eliminates the family-income gradient in enrollment among students with similar test scores. Moreover, access to loans also leads to higher enrollment in the second and third years of college. These ?ndings suggest that di?erential access to credit is an important factor behind the intergenerational transmission of income in Chile.

Low-skilled immigrants represent a significant fraction of employment in services that are close substitutes of household production. This paper studies whether the increased supply of low-skilled immigrants has led high-skilled women, who have the highest opportunity cost of time, to change their time-use decisions. Exploiting cross-city variation in immigrant concentration, we find that low-skilled immigration increases average hours of market work and the probability of working long hours of women at the top quartile of the wage distribution. Consistently, we find that women in this group decrease the time they spend in household work and increase expenditures on housekeeping services. (JEL J16, J22, J24, J61)

Even as Civil War history has gone through several cycles of revision, one thing has remained fixed: the number of dead. Since about 1900, historians and the general public have assumed that 618,222 men died on both sides. That number is probably a significant undercount, however. New estimates, based on Census data, indicate that the death toll was approximately 750,000, and may have been as high as 850,000.

In this research, I describe and explore the coresidence of adult children with their parents. Coresidence is a common phenomenon among American families. Yet our understanding of this phenomenon is often fraught with misunderstanding and stereotyping. Most of these stereotypes regard adult children in coresident relationships as immature, unemployed, and lazy. Guided by the life course perspective and previous research, I explore coresidency using a contemporary, large, nationally representative sample of coresiding adult children. Findings indicate the occurrence of coresidence and the characteristics of coresiders vary across age cohorts for both adult child and parent. Marital status, race and ethnicity, foreign birth, educational attainment, disability, employment and income are explored in relation to adult children and their parents.

This report examines the Hispanic population of the United States by its 10 largest country-of-origin sub-groups, both at the national level and in the 30 metropolitan areas with the largest Hispanic populations.The data for this report are derived from the 2010 U.S. Census and from the 2009 American Community Survey. The 2010 Census provides population counts for Hispanic origin sub-groups. The 2009 American Community Survey provides detailed geographic, demographic and economic characteristics for each group.Accompanying this report are profiles of the 10 largest Hispanic country-of-origin sub-groupsMexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Hondurans, Ecuadorians and Peruvians. An interactive graphic analyzing country-of-origin data among the nations 30 metropolitan statistical areas with the largest Hispanic populations is also available.

This paper serves two purposes: (1) to find the effect of the legalization of abortion on future wages and (2) to test Donohue-Levitt’s “Wantedness Hypothesis” (i.e., that relatively more wanted children have superior economic outcomes). Non-parametric evidence suggests that the legalization of abortion increased the annual salary and wage and salary income for people born before 1973 in a state with legal abortion. The OLS specifications suggest that once state surveyed and state of birth effects are included into the models the effect is negative. Once macroeconomic and other unobservable effects are controlled for, I find no evidence of an effect for non-Whites. Moreover, I find evidence contrary to the Wantedness Hypothesis for Whites, suggesting that Whites born in a state with illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade had lower wages after the policy change and were affected negatively by the access to abortion.

Immigrants account for a disproportionate share of the uninsured in the United States. While many low-income immigrants are eligible for Medicaid, languagebarriers often limit their awareness of public assistance. In this paper, we contribute to the previous literature on social networks and public programs using the American Community Survey, which allows us to explore variation across a large number of ethnic groups throughout the U.S. We show that linguistic networks facilitate Medicaid enrollment among non-English speaking adults. Similarto Bertrand et al. (2000), our identifi cation method employs local variation in the density of immigrant populations and nationwide variation in Medicaid participation across ethnic groups. We find Medicaid coverage is greater among potentially eligible immigrants who live in enclaves and whose language group is characterized by a high Medicaid-enrollment rate. Given a hypothetical policy to increase Medicaid enrollment, for every 1 percentage point of direct eff ect, the average network would boost take-up by an additional 0.2 percentage points. Our results are robust to alternative specifications, and we fi nd that networks have greater influence on individuals who are not profi cient in English or who arrived in the United States recently.

The paper explores the effect of unrestricted access to the birth control pill on young people’s career plans, using annual surveys of college freshmen from 1968 to 1980. In particular it addresses the question of who was affected by the introduction of the birth control pill by looking at career plans of both men and women, and by separating the effect by level of academic ability, race and family income. The results show that unrestricted access to the pill caused high ability women to move towards occupations with higher wages, higher occupational prestige scores and higher male ratios. The estimated effects for women with low grades and from low selectivity colleges are in the opposite direction. Men were also affected by unrestricted access to the pill, as their aspirations shifted towards traditionally male dominated occupations, across all ability groups. The biggest effect of unrestricted access to the pill is found to be on non-white students, both among men and women. The paper uses Census Data to compare the changes in career plans to actual changes in labor market outcomes. When looking at the actual career outcomes, early access to the pill affects both men and women - shifting their careers towards traditionally male dominated occupations associated with higher wages. Early access to the pill is also associated with significantly higher actual income for men.

The difference between religious service attendance measured using conventional surveys and time diaries has been attributed to identity processes; a high level of religious identity importance may prompt overreporting on a survey question. This article tests the hypothesized role of identity importance as an individual determinant of overreporting and the result of socially desirable behavior. A time diary measure of attendance (from the American Time Use Study 2003–2008) is imputed for conventional survey data (from the General Social Survey 2002–2008) using the multiple imputation for multiple studies procedure ( Gelman, King, and Liu 1998a ). Logistic regression models predicting self‐reported attendance and overreported attendance are estimated using identity importance as a key covariate and controlling for demographic variables associated with attendance. Identity importance is a strong predictor of both self‐reported and overreported attendance. Attendance, while a biased measure of actual behavior, may be a good indicator of religiosity.

Many low-income immigrants are uninsured yet eligible for public health insurance. In this paper, we examine whether language barriers and network effects can explain disparities in insurance Medicaid participation. Using the 2008 and 2009 American Community Survey, we show that linguistic networks facilitate Medicaid enrollment among non-English speaking adults. Our identification method follows Bertrand et al. (2000) and employs local variation in the density of immigrant populations and nationwide variation in Medicaid participation among ethnic groups. Given a hypothetical policy to increase Medicaid enrollment, for every 1 percentage point of direct increase, networks generate a multiplier effect that boosts participation by an additional 0.26 percentage points. Networks have greatest influence on individuals who are not proficient in English or who arrived in the United States more recently. Our results are robust to alternative specifications, including using an ex ante indicator of group-level participation. We also find that the availability of foreign-language Medicaid information online is associated with significantly higher participation.

Economic theory and anecdotal evidence suggest that the absence of formal contract enforcement leads to increased rates of violence in illegal markets. Lack of substantial variation in market legality has prevented empirical evaluation of the strength of this association. Using a state-level panel of age-specific homicide rates between 1900 and 1940, I demonstrate that criminalization of alcohol markets led to a compression of the age distribution of homicide victims. Specifically, homicide rates for individuals between the ages of 20 and 30 increased, while homicide rates for individuals under 20 and over 30 fell. Using modern homicide data, I show that this age-specific change in homicide rates is consistent with an increase in systemic violence, supporting the argument that the temperance movement contributed to the rise of organized crime in the United States. Banning the commercial sale of alcohol appears to have had a protective effect for children and mature adults, but this appears to have come at the expense of increasing the rate of violence among young adults.

It is well established that religious service attendance is overreported on conventional surveys. However, research has focused almost exclusively on overreporting in American survey data. This study extends the current body of research by pursuing the following question: Are Americans the only overreporters, or is this a ubiquitous survey artifact inherent to conventional survey measures of religious service attendance? Overreporting is estimated as the difference between directive measures from conventional surveys and those from time diaries. The survey artifact is examined across 14 countries and over four decades, highlighting the consistency and extremeness of (over)reported American religious participation, in light of concordance between modes in other countries. Findings suggest that American religiosity may be exceptional not in terms of actual behavior, but rather in terms of identity. As a result, this study adds to our understanding of American exceptionalism by drawing a distinction between religious identities and religious behavior.