The two largest minorities in the United States, African Americans and people of Hispanic origin, show official poverty rates that are at least twice as high as those among non-Hispanic Whites. These similarly high poverty rates among minorities are, however, the result of different combinations...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine retirement and related labor market outcomes for the Early Boomer cohort, those in their mid-fifties at the onset of the Great Recession. Outcomes are then compared with older cohorts at the same age. The Great Recession...

Recent estimates in standard models of wage determination for both unionization and occupational licensing have shown wage effects that are similar across the two institutions. These cross-sectional estimates use specialized data sets, with small sample sizes, for the period 2006 through 2008....

The aim of this paper is to explain why poverty and material deprivation in South Africa are significantly higher among those of African descent than among whites. To do so, we estimate the conditional levels of poverty and deprivation Africans would experience had they the same characteristics...

This paper presents a theory where increases in female labor force participation and reductions in the gender wage-gap are generated as part of a single process of demographic transition, characterized by reductions in mortality and fertility. The paper suggests a link between changes in...

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor. In particular, we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household access to credit mitigates the effects of these shocks. Using panel data from a...

Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? While it is established that a country's aggregate endowment of human capital is an important determinant of comparative advantage, this paper investigates whether the distribution of skills in the labor force can play a role in the...

How important are subsistence concerns in a family's decision to send a child to work? We consider this question in Ecuador, where poor families are selected at random to receive a cash transfer that is equivalent to 7 percent of monthly expenditures. Winning the cash transfer lottery is...

Although there is an extensive literature on the determinants of child labor and many initiatives aimed at combating it, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labor on socio-economic outcomes such as education, wages, and health. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor...

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success,...