Jeffery Grogger and colleagues propose to analyze previously untapped information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to estimate both intergenerational progress between second- and third-generation Mexican Americans and the extent of selective ethnic attrition, or when people stop identifying as Mexican.
The NLSY provides longitudinal information for a nationally-representative sample of youth living in the U.S. and between 12 and 16 years old when the survey began, in 1997.
The conventional wisdom is that early European immigrants assimilated quickly, while contemporary immigrants are assimilating more slowly, but is there strong evidence for this claim? Economic historians Leah Boustan, Ran Abramitzky and Katherine Eriksson propose to study the extent and pace of cultural assimilation of European immigrants during the so-called Age of Mass Migration (1850-1920), when the U.S.
Students from high-income families go to college at higher rates and are more likely to graduate than those from low-income families. This disparity has increased in recent decades. The factors that influence these post-secondary outcomes are varied, and include family circumstances (such as economic resources and family stability), school attributes (such as peer socioeconomic-status composition, teacher quality, and school resources), and neighborhood characteristics (such as crime orviolence).
Robert Moffitt will extend his prior research on the responsiveness of the social safety net during the Great Recession, which found that spending from the government stimulus was spread more evenly across low-income families of all types—particularly for those at the very bottom of the income distribution—than welfare benefits prior to the recession.
His new research will explore the impact of Medicaid expenditures for low-income families.
Nathaniel Hilger proposes a new methodology that allows for the estimation of intergenerational mobility on cross-sectional U.S. census data. Prior mobility research has largely ignored census data because the census only links parent and child outcomes while children still live with parents. Since children often become independent after age 18, it has been difficult to observe adult outcomes in a meaningful way. However, Hilger posits that parental background relates to final schooling in ways that turn out to be similar for dependent and independent children.
While income and wealth inequality have grown over the past decades, public support for redistribution has remained flat. One conjecture is that Americans believe that everybody gets a fair chance to make it and that one’s income is mostly the result of one’s own effort, rather than of one’s background—that is the "American Dream." Are these perceptions of social mobility consistent with reality?
The outcomes that individuals enjoy (such as income) are seen by some as consequences of both circumstances and effort. Circumstances are those characteristics of a person and his/her environment that are beyond his/her control—mainly, characteristics of the family in which the person was raised. Effort comprises those choices for which society believes a person should be held responsible. Equality of opportunity is said to hold when the chances that individuals have for achieving the outcome in question are independent of their circumstances, and sensitive only to their effort.
The rich make money in many ways, including receiving a sizeable portion of income from capital gains. While the extent and growth of income inequality has received much attention recently, much less attention has been paid to exploring the role played by capital gains in these phenomena. Previous research finds that the share of income received by the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent, and 0.01 percent has increased sharply since 1975 and that the composition of income at the very top has changed considerably.