After a lapse of over half a century, the United States has again become a country of immigration. In 1990, the foreign-born population reached 19.8 million or 7.9 percent of the total. By 2008, the number had grown to 39.3 million or 13 percent of the total. Although not yet reaching the...

This paper examines determinants of aspirations and expectations among children of immigrants based on a statistically representative sample of 3,375 second generation youths interviewed in 101 public and private secondary schools in metropolitan Madrid. We review the past literature on status...

The success and failure of any democratic government is gauged in terms of how effectively it has fulfilled its constitutional obligation of enhancing social and economic well-being, particularly the common man. While developed economies use a set of indices to measure well-being, a systematic...

In this paper I analyse a labour market where the wage is endogenously determined according to an Efficient Bargaining process between a firm and a labour union whose members are partitioned into two social groups: the old and the young. Furthermore, I exploit the Single-Mindedness theory, which...

The literature on development in economics and sociology has tended to focus on capital flows, investments and, more recently, institutions as key causal factors. International migration, when discussed, is relegated to the status of a symptom of underdevelopment and even a factor contributing...

Annually over 60,000 children in need of care are finding a permanent home through adoption in the U.S. In this study, I use a framework of family economics to examine the evolution of child adoption in the U.S. from 1950 to the present. Noting substantial heterogeneity within child adoption, I...

Dramatic fertility swings over the last 100 years have been the subject of large literatures in demography and economics. Recent research has claimed that the post-1960 fertility decline is exceptional enough to constitute a "Second Demographic Transition." The empirical case for a Second...

This paper examines the impact of New Deal relief programs on infant mortality, noninfant mortality and general fertility rates in major U.S. cities between 1929 and 1940. We estimate the effects using a variety of specifications and techniques for a panel of 114 cities for which data on relief...

This paper studies the contribution of sulfa drugs, a groundbreaking medical innovation in the 1930s, to declines in U.S. mortality. For several often-fatal infectious diseases, sulfa drugs represented the first effective treatment. Using time-series and difference-in-differences methods (with...