We assess how the support parents provide to young adults as they leave school and begin working is related to their family’s socioeconomic circumstances. We do this using an innovative Australian data set which merges survey and administrative data. The survey data inform us about...

We compare alternative methods for estimating immigrant wage and employment assimilation using unique panel data over 2001 - 2009 for a large, nationally-representative sample of immigrants. Previous assimilation estimates have been mainly based on crosssectional data and have therefore suffered...

This paper investigates whether job offers arrive more frequently for those in employment than for those in unemployment. To this end, we take advantage of a unique Australian data set which contains information on both accepted and rejected job offers. Our estimation strategy takes account of...

Legal cases are generally won or lost on the basis of statistical discrimination measures, but it is workers’ perceptions of discriminatory behavior that are important for understanding many labor-supply decisions. Workers who believe that they have been discriminated against are more likely...

Empirical studies of the role of non-cognitive skills in driving economic behavior often rely heavily on the assumption that these skills are stable over the relevant time frame. We analyze the change in a specific non-cognitive skill, i.e. locus of control, in order to directly assess the...

The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratification literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social...

We use a large, nationally-representative sample of working-age adults to demonstrate that personality (as measured by the Big Five) is stable over a four-year period. Average personality changes are small and do not vary substantially across age groups. Intra-individual personality change is...

This paper investigates the role of non-cognitive skills in the occupational segregation of young workers entering the U.S. labor market. We find entry into male-dominated fields of study and male-dominated occupations are both related to the extent to which individuals believe they are...

This paper analyzes the link between young people's sense (locus) of control over their lives and their investments in education. We find that young people with a more internal locus of control have a higher probability of finishing secondary school and, conditional on completion, meeting the...

This paper analyzes the degree of intergenerational education mobility among immigrant and native-born youth in Australia. We find that young Australians from non-English-speaking background (NESB) immigrant families have an educational advantage over their English speaking background (ESB)...