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Reports and Working Papers: Norms and Institutions

What's in Your Wallet? New Sources of Heterogeneity in Americans’ Economic Evaluations

Wendy M. Rahn; Philip Chen
Working Paper; 2012

Nearly three years after the official end of the Great Recession, the American economy is starting to show, at long last, some “moderate” improvement as the nation heads into a presidential election campaign in which the economy is likely to be a central issue. Yet some parts of the macroeconomy are more improved than others. Housing prices, for example, after having fallen more than 30% (or more, in certain hard-hit areas) off their 2006 peak, have yet to bottom out and it may be years before any significant price appreciation returns.

Inheritances and the Distribution of Wealth, or Whatever Happened to the Great Inheritance Boom?

Edward N. Wolff; Maury Gittleman
European Central Bank Working Paper Series ; 2011

We found that on average over the period from 1989 to 2007, 21 percent of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for 23 percent of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and these would account for close to 40 percent of their net worth near time of death. However, there is little evidence of an inheritance “boom.” In fact, from 1989 to 2007, the share of households reporting a wealth transfer fell by 2.5 percentage points.

Unions, Norms, and the Rise in American Wage Inequality

Jake Rosenfeld; Bruce Western
Working Paper; 2011

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent among women. Inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent in this period. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the shrinking weight of the union wage distribution. We also argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries.

The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perceptions

Andrew Penner; Aliya Saperstein
Social Problems; 2010

In the United States, racial disparities in incarceration and their consequences are widely discussed and debated. Previous research suggests that perceptions of crime and the operations of the criminal justice system play an important role in shaping how Americans think about race. This study extends the conversation by exploring whether being incarcerated affects how individuals perceive their own race as well as how they are perceived by others, using unique longitudinal data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

The Mommy Track Divides: The Impact of Childbearing on Wages of Women of Differing Skill Levels

Elizabeth Ty Wilde; David Ellwood; Lily Batchelder
National Bureau of Economic Research; 2010

This paper explores how the wage and career consequences of motherhood differ by skill and timing. Past work has often found smaller or even negligible effects from childbearing for high-skill women, but we find the opposite. Wage trajectories diverge sharply for high scoring women after, but not before, they have children, while there is little change for low-skill women. It appears that the lifetime costs of childbearing, especially early childbearing, are particularly high for skilled women.