One in nine people between the ages of 18 and 64 in the US, and every second foreign-born person in this age bracket, speaks Spanish at home. And whereas around 80 percent of adult immigrants in the US from non-English speaking countries other than Mexico are proficient in English, only about 50...

A number of researchers point to the anticipation of early death, or a sense of "futurelessness," as a contributing factor to youth crime and violence. Young people who perceive a high probability of early death, it is argued, may have little reason to delay gratification for the promise of...

Child care subsidies are an important part of federal and state efforts to move welfare recipients into employment. One of the criticisms of the current subsidy system, however, is that it overemphasizes work and does little to encourage parents to purchase high-quality child care. Consequently,...

Child maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is a major social problem. This paper focuses on measuring the effects of child maltreatment on crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of...

This paper examines whether the results of the earnings equation developed in the overeducation/required eduation/under-education (ORU) literature are sensitive to whether the usual or reference levels of education are measured using the Realized Matches or Worker Self-Assessment methods. The...

This paper examines the way immigrant earnings are determined in Australia. It uses the overeducation/required education/undereducation (ORU) framework (Hartog, 2000) and a decomposition of the native-born/foreign-born differential in the payoff to schooling developed by Chiswick and Miller...

"A critical period for language learning is often defined as a sharp decline in learning outcomes with age. This study examines the relevance of the critical period to English proficiency among immigrants in the US. It uses microdata from the 2000 US Census, a model of language acquisition from...

"This paper analyzes the effect on earnings of the matching of English language skills to occupational requirements. It uses data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database and a "Realized Matches" procedure to quantify expected levels of English skills in each of over 500...

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the US is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the Over-education/ Required...

In recent years, child care subsidies have become an integral part of federal and state efforts to move economically disadvantaged parents from welfare to work. Although previous empirical studies consistently show that these employment-related subsidies raise work levels among this group,...