This paper argues that young Hispanic (or Latina/o) children (ages 3 to 8 years) should be of particular interest to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in education. Young Hispanic children constitute an urgent demographic imperative. Young Hispanic children are not only the largest racial/ethnic group in the U.S., but also the youngest and fastest-growing. Among racial/ethnic groups, Hispanics have a unique linguistic profile. Approximately three in four young Hispanic children lives in homes in which at least some Spanish is spoken regularly. Empirical evidence suggests that certain interventions during the early years are a wise investment to improving learning opportunities and outcomes for Hispanic children. Hispanics lag behind their white and Asian-American peers at all proficiency levels of reading and mathematics at the beginning and throughout PK-12 schooling. In order for young Hispanics to succeed in academic contexts, they need strong English skills. Recent research suggests academic benefits of bilingual over English-only programs, enough to close one-fifth to one-third of the overall Hispanic-White reading performance gap. Moreover, recent research shows young Hispanics are particularly positioned to benefit from prekindergarten participation even though they are less likely to attend compared to other racial/ethnic groups.

What parents do with their children shifts a great deal over the course of childrens lives. Parenting an infant is quite different from parenting a teenager, and differs even more markedly from parenting a child who is grown up and no longer lives at home. While it is common knowledge that parents do different things with their children as those children grow and their needs shift, we know less about how shifts in parenting over childhood has implications for parents. In other words, how do the workloads of parents shift when they have very young children as compared with older children? What happens to parental leisure time over the parenthood trajectory? How much does parent-child time decline as children age and how do the types of activities parents and children do together shift? We are seeking a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of parenting as it looks over the entire course of childhood rather than slices at particular points when workloads are thought to be the heaviest. This paper examines how the day-to-day activities of both parents and children shift as children age from infancy to adulthood and how this has implications for both parents and children. Other studies have examined short windows in the parenthood trajectory (e.g. the transition from non-parent to parent, from parent of preschool-age child to parent of school-age), but few studies have examined this in-depth across the whole of childhood, at least in part because no data source was large enough to provide that level of detail. We make use of the large number of time diaries from the five years of the American Time Use Survey to provide that detail. We disaggregate our analysis by both sex of the parent as well as parental education given that mothers tend to be more involved parents than fathers in the US and given that education level is an important factor affecting both time in paid employment and child care. Perhaps most importantly, our analysis is nuanced in that we examine the parenthood trajectory both from the perspective of the parent as well as the perspective of the child, examining parent time diaries from the (2003-2007) American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and child time diaries from the 1997-2002 Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (PSID-CDS).

Household ?nancial market participation aects asset prices and household welfare. Yet,our understanding of the participation decision is limited. Using an instrumental variablesstrategy and dataset new to this literature, we provide the ?rst precise, causal estimates ofthe eects of education on ?nancial market participation. We ?nd a large eect, even con-trolling for income. Examining mechanisms, we demonstrate that cognitive ability increasesparticipation; however, and in contrast to previous research, ?nancial literacy education doesnot aect decisions. We conclude by discussing how education may aect decision-makingthrough: personality, borrowing behavior, discount rates, risk-aversion, and the in?uence ofemployers and neighbors.

The long-term trend towards later and less marriage in the low-fertility countries of East and Southeast Asia has continued into the early years of the twenty-first century, and indeed accelerated in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. This paper examines the extent to which this is a general trend cutting across all educational attainment groups, and the extent to which it can be explained by increasing proportions in the educational categories characterized by higher levels of singlehood (in the case of females, the higher levels of education). In the countries where the rise in singlehood has been the steepest, changing educational composition has played a relatively minor role in the case of women. For men, in all countries examined, it has played only a minor role, or actually worked against rising singlehood. The paper examines likely reasons for these trends.

A substantial amount of evidence documents the correlation between socio-economic status (SES) and health outcomes. People with higher incomes, more education or better jobs also experience improvements in general health and lower disease incidence. But the correlation between SES and health does not imply causation, and the past decade has seen an increased effort to discern causal relationships using natural experiments. One of the health variables of particular interest is excess body weight, which has received much attention over the last 30 years as many countries have experienced a surge in obesity prevalence. Obesity is commonly measured by the body mass index (BMI) and is closely associated with SES, especially among women.This dissertation examines three topics related to SES and health: First, how does BMI vary with SES, as measured by education and income, and have these relationships changed over time? How do these relationships differ by gender and race, and across three major U.S. national health data sets (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, National Health Interview Survey, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System)? Second, does education have a causal effect on obesity? I examine this association using compulsory schooling laws as a source of exogenous variation in schooling. Special attention is paid to differences by gender and estimation and testing procedures that are robust to weak instruments. Third, is there a causal connection between education and other health behaviors and outcomes, such as self-rated health, hypertension, smoking, and alcohol consumption?Results presented in Chapter 1 suggest that disparities between low- and medium-SES groups have almost disappeared over the last 30 years, while high-SES groups continue to enjoy an advantage. In terms of BMI trends, Hispanic males are comparable to white and black males, while Hispanic females are in-between white and black females. The three datasets examined in this work yield different prevalence rates but similar trends.The second chapter, using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1971 to 1980, finds a strong and statistically significant negative effect of additional schooling on BMI for women and no effect for men (an extra year of schooling is estimated to reduce BMI by about one unit for women). These results are robust to weak instruments and various other validity checks, and suggest that policies designed to increase years of schooling for at-risk populations might lead to substantial improvements in obesity rates.In the third chapter, using the same methodology and data set as in Chapter 2, I find strong correlations between educational attainment and various other health outcomes. Weak instruments do not permit any conclusions about causality in this analysis.In sum, this work contributes to the literature in three ways: First, it provides the most credible estimate to date of the causal impact of schooling on obesity. Second, it documents trends in the association between SES and obesity over the last 30 years using three major nationally representative data sets from the U.S., paying special attention to differences across gender and race. Third, it examines the usefulness of compulsory schooling laws in estimating causal effects of education on other health outcomes in the early NHANES. Weak instrument problems suggest that alternative approaches should be pursued in future research.

It is often asserted that a highly educated workforce is vital to improving the competitive position of American businesses, especially by boosting entrepreneurship. To examine this contention, we use population Census data and a rich, new, nationally representative panel of startup firms, to examine how the education and skill level of the local labor force are related to the creation and success of new businesses. We find that areas that possess more skilled labor also possess higher rates of self-employment and more skilled entrepreneurs. As in previous studies, we find that education of the business owner is strongly linked to improved business outcomes. Potentially consistent with the popular view, we also find that, conditional on owner's education, higher education levels in the local market are positively correlated with improvedbusiness outcomes.

This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870-2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto (2007) database. The correlation between the two sets of average years of schooling in 1960 is equal to 0.96. We use a measurement error framework to merge the two databases, while correcting for a systematic measurement bias in Cohen and Soto (2007) linked to differential mortality across educational groups. Descriptive statistics show a continuous spread of education that has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. We find evidence of fast convergence in years of schooling for a sub-sample of advanced countries during the 1870-1914 globalization period, and of modest convergence since 1980. Less advanced countries have been excluded from the convergence club in both cases.

This paper expands what we know about parenting and stratification by describing the parenting behaviors that tend to vary by parental education. It elaborates on the perspectives of Bourdieu (1977), Coleman (1988), and Lareau (2002) to offer a more nuanced understanding of how parents transmit and develop their children's social and cultural capital. Analyzing both parent and child time diaries from the 2003-2007 ATUS and 1997 PSID-CDS respectively, we find that in terms of cultural capital, highly educated parents are enrolling their children in more organized activities, limiting television viewing, encouraging more reading time, and interacting more frequently with school officials and organizations relative to parents who are less educated. They also do less household work with their children. From a social capital perspective, however, better educated parents spend less time with extended family, but invest more time in parent-child meals, and spend slightly more time visiting with their children and non-family members than less educated parents.

The proliferation of R&D tax incentives among U.S. states in recent decades raises two questions: (i) Are these tax incentives effective in increasing in-state R&D? (ii) How much of any increase is due to R&D being drawn away from other states? This paper answers (i) “yes” and (ii) “nearly all.” The paper estimates an augmented R&D factor demand model using state panel data from 1981 to 2004. I estimate that the long-run elasticity of in-state R&D with respect to the in-state user cost is about –2.5, while its elasticity with respect to out-of-state user costs is about +2.5, suggesting a zero-sum game among states.

I use unique data from the October Supplement of the Current Population Survey to show that the return to foreign education among immigrants is 3.3 percent. Previous studies generate upwardly biased estimates of this parameter because they (1) systematically misattribute domestic education as foreign education and (2) include domestic education as an endogenous control variable. The results indicate that foreign education is less portable than previously thought. Non-linear specifications indicate that the difference in the return to foreign education among immigrants and the return to domestic education among natives is limited to workers with less than twelve years of schooling.

This article presents new estimates of time spent in home production in the U.S. during the twentieth Century. Historical time-diary studies for various segments of the population are linked to estimates from recent time use surveys. The new estimates suggest that time spent in home production by prime-age women fell by around six hours from 1900 to 1965 and by another 12 hours from 1965 to 2005. Time spent by prime-age men rose by 13 hours from 1900 to 2005. Averaged across the entire population, per capita time spent in home production increased slightly over the century.

Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the United States peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one-half and then declined to one-third. We argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth, with the share of women proxying for inherited wealth. If so, wealth mobility decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter. Such an interpretation is consistent with technological change driving long-term trends in mobility and inequality, as well as the recent divergence between top wealth and top income shares documented elsewhere.

We develop comprehensive measures of time spent in market work, home production, schooling, and leisure in the United States for the last 106 years. We find that hours of work for prime age individuals are essentially unchanged, with the rise in women's hours fully compensating for the decline in men's hours. Hours worked by those 14 to 24 years old have declined noticeably, but most of this decline was offset by a rise in hours spent in school. Overall, per capita leisure and average annual lifetime leisure increased by only four or five hours per week during the last 100 years.

Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of Californias urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities.Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter groups access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a model minority, whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs. As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeownersand insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.

This paper explains a weighting procedure used to produce representative statistics for matched respondents from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS). The matched respondents are those with observations in the ASEC supplement for following the year, which is less than 50% of the original sample. The weighting scheme presented here is similar to that used to create the Census Bureau's CPS outgoing rotation group weights, where observations are reweighted using variable estimates from the full ASEC supplement by labor force status, race and sex. Additionally, a weight adjusted using the following years person weight is calculated and proposed for longitudinal analysis.

A model with leisure production and endogenous retirement is used to explain the declining labor force participation rates of elderly males. The model is calibrated to cross-sectional data on the labor force participation rates of elderly US males by age, their median drop in marketconsumption and leisure good expenditure share in the year 2000. Running the calibrated model for the period 1850 to 2000, a prediction of the evolution of the cross-section is obtained. The model is able to predict more than 87 percent of the increase in retirement of men over 65. The increase in retirement is driven by rising real wages and a falling price of leisure goods over time.

The high rates of Mexican immigration into the United States in recent decades raises questions about marital assimilation and social closure. We use data for approximately two million couples aged 30-39 from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 IPUMS census samples for the USA to analyze the demographic and social dynamics of ethnic endogamy and educational homogamy (N = 2,019,754). Log-linear models leave no doubt that endogamy remains the rule among the Mexican-born, Mexican-origin and Non-Hispanic Whitesboth at the national and local levels (~2,000 PUMAS). The increase in endogamy among the Mexican-born, while significant, does not portend the emergence of social closure, perhaps not even a trend. Post-secondary education substantially weakens the endogamy rule for all three groups. The gender squeeze (more Mexican born males than females) forces the rule to be broken in a large fraction of cases. 2010 census microdata will provide an important test of these findings.