This paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males. Longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage, and that cross-sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile. Data from a company personnel file...

We explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross-sectional relationships between marriage, motherhood, and wages. We find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the "direct" effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and tenure);...

We use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women. This analysis yields evidence of biases in OLS estimates of wage equations for white and black women, some of which are detected only when the two sources of bias are...

We investigate income, marital status, and hourly pay differentials by body mass (kg/m ²) in a sample of 23- to 31-year-olds drawn from the 1988 NLSY. Obese women have lower family incomes than women whose weight-for-height is in the "recommended" range. Results for men are weaker and mixed. We...

This paper contains the first infant health production functions that simultaneously consider the effects of a variety of inputs on race-specific neonatal mortality rates. These inputs include the use of prenatal care, neonatal intensive care, abortion, federally subsidized organized family...

The paper tests whether the impact of prenatal care on birthweight is contaminated by selection bias, and if so, whether adverse or favorable selection dominates. A two-stage selectivity correction model with an ordered criterion function is applied to race- and ethnic-specific data from 1984...

This is the first study that decomposes unemployment into its structural and cyclical components and investigates their impact on income distribution, controlling for the influence of inflation. Increases in structural unemployment have a substantial ...

In this paper I compare changes in homicide and arrest rates among cohorts born before and after the legalization of abortion to changes in crime in the same years among similar cohorts who were unexposed to legalized abortion. I find little consistent evidence that the legalization of abortion...

We investigated whether the September 11, 2001 terrorists’ attacks had any effect on employment, earnings, and residential mobility of first- and second-generation Arab and Muslim men in the United States. We find that September 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of...

This paper analyzes the effects of illicit drug use on the labor supply of a sample of young adults using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The paper investigates whether the frequency and timing of marijuana and cocaine use are systematically related to labor supply, and...