In recent years, women have made considerable gains relative to men in the labor market. Most notably, the gender gap in hourly wages has narrowed substantially. In this paper we divide workers into three skill groups on the basis of education, and analyze how the hourly earnings of women in...

Economic segregation increased in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Three hypotheses suggest that this would affect low-income children's educational attainment. The political economy of school funding and predicts that economically segregated school districts reduce the educational...

Despite concerns about inequalities in the provision of health care in the United States, and despite a considerable amount of previous research, we know little about the distribution of medical services across income or more broadly defined socioeconomic groups. This paper uses a unique data...

I estimate the effect of the change in the gini coefficient of household income since 1970 on children's chances of graduating from high school, enrolling in college and graduating from college by combining PSID data on individual children with state-level data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990...

We use data from the PSID to assess whether the effect of parental income on son's economic status has changed for cohorts born between 1949 and 1965. We find that the effect of parental income on sons' family income and wages at age thirty declined over this period. This was largely because the...

Households became more geographically segregated by income in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Research shows that growing up in a poor neighborhood is associated with worse outcomes for children. This suggests that economic segregation may be harmful to children. Economic inequality...

We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Mother-Child Files to estimate the effect of age at enrollment in first grade on eight to eleven year old children's cognitive test scores and behavior problems. We find that children who enroll in first grade at a young age score higher...

This report reviews research on trends in the caseloads of three means-tested transfer programs in the United States: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and the Food Stamp Program (FSP). <p> Trends in caseloads are the result of 1) program parameters...</p>

Households became more geographically segregated by income in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Economic inequality also increased between 1970 and 1990. Using 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census data, I find that an increase in income inequality at the state level is associated with an increased...