Two million Mexicans were granted lawful permanent residency in the U.S. under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). We find that occupation and program use variables in a prominent proxy for legal status poorly detect this event. A decade after legalization, the share of...

Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that the Black/white gap in standard net worth widened from 1989 to 2019 but narrowed between Hispanics and (non-Hispanic) whites. When the definition of wealth is expanded to incorporate Social Security and defined benefit pension wealth (both the...

Recent work on wealth inequality based on the capitalization method wherein aggregate wealth totals are distributed in proportion to various forms of income like dividends has motivated a concern about whether rates of return on assets vary across the wealth distribution. In this study, I use a...

We review select literature on racial and ethnic disparities in retirement outcomes and the impact of outreach on such outcomes. First, there are significant disparities in retirement outcomes, reflecting a long history of racism and structural barriers. Second, there is comparatively little...

We explore the labor market for Hispanic high school graduates in the United States by age using information from the US Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and three laboratory experiments. We find, in general, that the differences in outcomes for Hispanic and...

This article reviews evidence on the labor market performance of Hispanics in the United States, with a particular focus on the US-born segment of this population. After discussing critical issues that arise in the US data sources commonly used to study Hispanics, we document how Hispanics...

Retirement income security refers to the ability of households to provide an adequate stream of income during the period of their retirement from the labor force. Expected retirement income is based of four components: (i) standard non-pension wealth holdings, (ii) defined contribution (DC)...

The authors explore unique complete-count data from the 1930 Census in which a respondent's race was assigned by enumerators and "Mexican" was one of the possible responses. Census enumerators frequently and selectively assigned a non-Mexican race--predominantly "white"--to U.S.-born individuals...

Political discourse has often stoked racial and ethnic divisions, raising the possibility that individuals' self-reported racial and ethnic identities may change in response to an increasingly hostile environment. We shed light on this question by measuring the impacts of local support for...