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...

Despite concerns about inequalities in the provision of health care in the US 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 file from the...

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...

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. 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...

The elasticity of children’s economic status with respect to parents’ economic status is often taken as an indicator of the extent of equality of opportunity. While many studies have estimated the elasticity for the United States and other countries, only a few have tried to estimate the...

This paper examines the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next. We use intergenerational data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Child Supplement to estimate the effect of parental family SES (income and education) and other family background...

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 1985, 1987 and 1991 United States Vital Statistics Linked Infant Birth and Death Records to assess the effect of state-level economic inequality on an infant’s probability of death. We find that economic inequality is associated with higher neonatal mortality even after we...

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...