Research has shown that blacks are relatively disadvantaged when compared with whites on a host of sociological indicators including on income, education and occupational status. Recent research has shown blacks are not all equally disadvantaged. In some cases such as in the case of blacks in Queens County, New York, blacks surpass whites in terms of median income, especially foreign-born blacks. Yet, blacks fare worse when compared with whites on indicators of asset ownership. Despite that, some black ethnic groups including those with roots in the Caribbean or from Africa have been shown to have higher rates of home ownership and higher housing values than African-Americans. However, few studies include measures of asset ownership beyond these indicators when assessing the extent to which ethnicity matters for blacks. The present study examines the following research questions: (1) What factors explain variations in the likelihood of ownership and the levels of interest, dividends and rental income owned for blacks? (2) Is ethnicity a significant predictor for black respondents? (3) Does education and occupation matter more for some black ethnic groups than for others? The findings reveal that ethnicity plays a significant role in the acquisition and accumulation of interest, dividends and rental income, but it does not account for all of the variations observed for blacks. The findings shed further light on the complexities associated with understanding wealth inequality and racial and ethnic group variations.

In this paper we investigate the effect of relative income on marital status. We develop an identity model based on Akerlof and Kranton (2000) and apply it to the marriage decision. The empirical evidence is consistent with the idea that people are more likely to marry when their incomes approach a financial level associated with idealized norms of marriage. We hypothesize that the "marriage ideal" is determined by the median income in an individual's local reference group. After controlling flexibly for the absolute level of income and a number of other factors, the ratio between a man's income and the marriage ideal is a strong predictor of marital status -- but only if he is below the ideal. For white men, relative income considerations jointly drive co-residence, marriage, and fatherhood decisions. For black men, relative income affects the marriage decision only, and relative income is tied to marital status even for those living with a partner and children. Relative income concerns explain 10-15 percent of the decline in marriage since 1970 for low income white men, and account for more than half of the persistent marriage gap between high- and low-income men.

The entry of married women into the labor force is one of the most notable economic phenomena of the twentieth century. We argue that medical progress played a critical role in this process. Improved maternal health alleviated the adverse effects of pregnancy and childbirth on women's ability to work, while the introduction of infant formula reduced mothers' comparative advantage in infant feeding. We construct economic measures of these two dimensions of medical progress and develop a quantitative model that aims to capture their impact. Our results suggests that these advances, by enabling women to reconcile work and motherhood, were essential for the rise in married women's participation and the evolution of their economic role.

(June 2009) Over the last several decades, many industries have experienced significant structural changes that have affected their employees. The airline industry, for example, has faced major policy and economic forces that have changed the demography of its workers, especially its flight attendants.Civil rights laws in the mid-1960s made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of age, sex, or race. Thus, the airline industry had to abandon its preference for hiring young women as well as its no-marriage and no-pregnancy rules and weight restrictions. In addition, deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s led to a hiring freeze of flight attendants and an ensuing preferential treatment for hiring workers furloughed by other airlines.1 Finally, the Sept. 11 attacks resulted in significant layoffs of flight attendants. In this environment, many flight attendants with low levels of accrued seniority were often the first to be furloughed.Flight attendants have become older compared with the overall U.S. workforce over the last several decades. The ongoing economic crisis suggests that the population of flight attendants will age even more in the coming years as many workers are likely to postpone their retirement.2

This dissertation analyzes the U.S. national and regional press discourse concerning labor violations and the rights of undocumented (illegal) immigrants in American workplaces; these workers undocumented immigration status renders them especially vulnerable to employers abuses, since many are silenced into submission by fear of deportation. More specifically, this dissertation examines how the U.S. press has covered two instances where alleged violations of labor laws have become news events through public campaigns to bring attention to the issue. The two case studies analyzed in this dissertation are: the DKNY campaign involving garment manufacturing workers in Manhattan, New York; and the Taco Bell campaign involving tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida. In both case studies, local labor organizations representing the workers, launched campaigns to bring attention to the responsibility of large corporations who were primary purchasers of their products, although not their direct employers. This dissertation also examines whether and how the press coverage discussed the fact that many of the workers in these industries (garment manufacturing and agriculture) are undocumented immigrants. The results of the press analysis show that most of the U.S. national and regional press coverage did not focus on the workers' undocumented immigration status, and that the campaign organizers did not attempt to address this issue. Rather, the labor campaign organizers in the case studies believed it was in their interest to keep immigration status out of the press coverage, because they wished to focus on the labor violations, but also because they believed American readers would be less sympathetic to the workers plight if they were informed that some of the workers may be undocumented immigrants. This dissertation argues that this silence in the press concerning labor violations committed against undocumented workers in the U.S. impoverishes public discourse about illegal immigration by leaving this significant human rights concern out of the general debate, and ultimately also impoverishes policy debates about comprehensive immigration policy solutions.

A considerable body of research has found a positive relationship between parents' socioeconomic status and children's educational achievement and attainment. The predictive role of parents' socioeconomic status generally applies for most racial and ethnic groups, but that association does not always hold for groups that exhibit high levels of education, such as Asian Americans. This article considers the role of parents' education and occupation on children's educational and occupational attainment for Chinese Americans aged 1832. The results corroborate the positive link between parents' socioeconomic status and children's educational and occupational attainments. Children of professionals command an educational and occupational advantage over children of entrepreneurs and children of manual workers. Yet, the children of entrepreneurs attend selective colleges and obtain professional occupations in proportions closely following those of the children of professionals. Although the educational attainments between the fathers who worked as entrepreneurs and those fathers engaged in manual work were comparable, it was the children of entrepreneurs who surpassed the children of manual workers with respect to educational and occupational achievement and attainment. This suggests that immigrant entrepreneurship contributes in the upward educational and occupational mobility of the children of entrepreneurs.

The number of immigrants in the US economy has been increasing rapidly in recent decades. An extensive literature has investigated the eff ect of this large influx of immigrants on native workers' labor market opportunities. However, to date this literature has not reached a consensus about the consequences of immigration. In this paper, I present a new approach to the analysis ofthe relationship between immigration and wages based on a panel vector autoregression (VAR) analysis. I develop a flexible model of the joint dynamics of wages, foreign immigration, and internal migration, allowing for capital mobility. I then implement this model empirically usingannual CPS data. The VAR analysis of a 26-year panel of US states shows that immigration does not have a signifi cant effect on wages or internal migration. By contrast, wages do a ffect immigration. The estimated coefficients imply that a 10 percent increase in wages causes up to a 20 percent increase in the rate of immigrant in flow after 3 years. These estimates hide signifi cant heterogeneity: the effect is strongest for low-skill immigrants while it is small and insignifi cant for high-skill immigrants.

Examining educational trends since 1940 in the United States, this paper finds that the familiar monotonically-increasing percentage of high school graduates in the adult population (25 and older) stalls in recent years, although the percentage completing at least four years of college continues to rise. Using Census and American Community Survey data, we find that the age structure of education has changed strongly with the 15 to 20 percentage point advantage in high school graduation among young adults aged 25-34 compared to their seniors aged 45-64, then began to shrink in about 1990 and has now reversed. There are striking state differences. No state had a reversal in 1990. By 2000, 11 states, mostly western, had reversals. By 2006, reversals continued in all the western states, and emerged across much of the Midwest and in scattered eastern and southern states as well.

This paper presents a model where human capital differences, rather than residual productivity differences, can explain several central phenomena in the world economy. In the model, workers choose both the duration and content of their training. A "knowledge trap" occurs where skilled workers avoid narrow, deep training and thus fail, collectively, to embody frontier knowledge. Standard human capital accounting is shown to underestimate the resulting skill differences between rich and poor nations. The theory may explain price, wage and income differences across countries, and suggests novel interpretations of immigrant outcomes, poverty traps, and the brain drain, among other applications.

Medicare as a Secondary Payer (MSP) legislation requires employer-sponsored health insurance to be a primary payer for Medicare-eligible workers at firms with 20 or more employees. While the legislation was developed to better target Medicare services to individuals without access to employer-sponsored insurance, MSP creates a significant implicit tax on working beyond age 65. This implicit tax is approximately 15-20 percent at age 65 and increases to 45-70 percent by age 80. Eliminating this implicit tax by making Medicare a primary payer for all Medicare-eligible individuals could significantly increase lifetime labor supply due to the high labor supply elasticities of older workers. The extra income tax receipts from such a policy would likely offset a large percentage of the estimated costs of making Medicare a primary payer.

There has been a substantial increase in the average duration of unemployment relative to the unemployment rate in the U.S. over the last 30 years. We evaluate the performance of a standard job-search model in explaining this phenomenon. In particular, we examine whether the increase in within-group wage inequality and the decline in the incidence of unemployment can account for the increase in unemployment duration. The results indicate that these two changes can explain a significant part of the increase over the last 30 years, although the model fails to match the behavior of unemployment duration during 1980s.

One of the most striking features of crime in America is its disproportionate concentration in disadvantaged,racially segregated communities. In this paper we estimate the effects of court-ordered school desegregationon crime by exploiting plausibly random variation in the timing of when these orders go into effectacross the set of large urban school districts ever subject to such orders. For black youth, we find thathomicide victimization declines by around 25 percent when court orders are implemented and homicidearrests also decline significantly, which seem to be due at least in part to increased schooling attainment.We also find positive spillover effects to other groups, with beneficial changes in homicide involvementfor black adults and perhaps whites as well. Our estimates imply that imposition of these court ordersin the nations largest school districts lowered the homicide rate to black teens and young adults nationwideby around 13 percent, and might account for around one-quarter of the convergence in black-whitehomicide rates over the period from 1970 to 1980.

Portable housing vouchers can help low-income families move to lower-poverty neighborhoods.However, jurisdictional boundaries between housing authorities (HAs) may decrease the effectiveportability of vouchers. Such boundaries create funding disincentives for HAs to help their clientsmove to other jurisdictions. They also add a burden for landlords, who, as a result, may be less inclinedto rent to voucher recipients. Two approaches for addressing the problems posed by jurisdictionalboundaries are meta-level HAs and increased cooperation between regional HAs. UsingIntegrated Public Use Microdata Series Current Population Survey (IPUMS CPS) data, this paperpresents a preliminary analysis of the effects of these approaches on voucher portability and povertydeconcentration. The analysis reveals mixed results, with some showing significant promise. Akron,OH, Portland, OR, and Jacksonville, FL are potential success stories from which there is still muchto learn.

This paper provides new empirical evidence about the influence exerted by migrationnetworks upon migrants self-selection in education from the analysis of the recent process ofEcuadorian migration. The severe economic crisis that hit Ecuador in the late 1990s induced amassive wave of migration, from a country which was characterized by a substantial geographicalvariability in the size of migration networks. As Ecuadorian migrants opted for a variety ofdestination countries in the aftermath of the crisis, we estimate a multinomial logistic model toassess the impact of migration networks on both migrants sorting and self-selection. The estimatesare in line with the theoretical arguments which predict that migration networks increase thelikelihood or the extent of a negative self-selection of the migrants with respect to education.

This paper proposes a new model to identify if and how much the educational attainment gap between blacks and whites is due to the difference in their neighborhoods. In this model, individuals belong to two unobserved types: the endogenous type who may move in response to the neighborhood effect on their education; or the exogenous type who may move for reasons unrelated to education. The Heckman sample selection model becomes a special case of the current model in which the probability of one type of individuals is zero. Although we cannot find any significant neighborhood effect in the usual Heckman sample selection model, we do find heterogeneous effects in our type-consistent model. In particular, there is a substantial neighborhood effect for the movers who belong to the endogenous type. No significant effects exist for other groups. We also find that the endogenous type has more education and moves more often than the exogenous type. On average, we find that the neighborhood variable, the percentage of high school graduates in the neighborhood, accounts for about 37.7% of the education gap between blacks and whites.Keywords: