This study uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate the relationship between men's economic status and the characteristics of the families and communities in which they grew up. It is distinguished from most previous studies by its emphasis on community...

Linkages in the across-time unemployment experiences of adult men are the focus of this paper. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, the paper first documents the strong persistence in unemployment for adult men. It then explores possible explanations for this persistence, searching for...

According to human capital theory, women's work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth. We test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals, both past and prospective, part-time work experience, and working in "male" rather than in "female" jobs...

Numerous previous studies have used sibling correlations to measure the importance of family background as a determinant of economic status. The sibling correlations estimated in these studies, however, have been depressed by a failure to distinguish transitory and permanent income variation...

A comparison of the correlations between brothers and neighboring boys in their adult earnings suggests that the earnings resemblance between brothers stems more from growing up in the same family than from growing up in the same neighborhood. Much of ...

This article uses a new data set to investigate the extent to which differences in work history, on-the-job training, absenteeism, and self-imposed restrictions on work hours and location account for wage differences between the sexes and races. As expected, white men generally had more...

Public concern with poverty derives in large part from the assumption that low income families cannot afford necessities. Yet official poverty statistics focus on measuring income, not on measuring material hardship. Two surveys of Chicago residents measure whether families could afford food,...