This paper studies the occupational selection among generations of immigrants in the United States and links their choices to the occupational wage distribution in their country of origin. The empirical results suggest that individuals are more likely to take up an occupation in the US that was...

Using historical, longitudinal data on individuals, we track the earnings of immigrant and U.S.-born women. Following individuals, instead of synthetic cohorts, avoids biases in earnings-growth estimates caused by compositional changes in the cohorts that are followed. The historical data...

Chay, Guryan and Mazumder (2009) found substantial racial convergence in AFQT and NAEP scores across cohorts born in the 1960's and early 1970's that was concentrated among blacks in the South. We demonstrated a close tracking between variation in the test score convergence across states and...

The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

This study examines the gender wage gap between male and female workers in the US using a cross-section from the Current Population Survey (CPS) It shows that the extent of gender segregation by both industry and occupation is significantly greater than previously supposed. For the wage gap this...

This study examines the gender wage gap in the US using two separate cross-sections from the Current Population Survey (CPS). The extensive literature on this subject includes papers which use wage decompositions to divide gender wag gaps into "explained" and "unexplained" components. Problems...

This paper examines the effects of introducing compulsory attendance laws on the schooling of U.S. children for three overlapping time periods: 1880-1927, 1890-1927, and 1898-1927. The previous literature finds little effect of the laws, which is somewhat surprising given that the passage of...

Economic inequality is higher today than it has been since 1939, as measured by both the wage structure and wealth inequality. But the comparison between 1939 and 1999 is largely made out of necessity; the 1940 U.S. population census was the first to inquire of wage and salary income and...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how potential exposure to missionary activity impacts both English language proficiency and labor market earnings of male and female immigrants to the United States. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study uses the pooled files of the American...

Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong—defying nearly all earlier projections—and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on...