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...

Only a few studies have tried to estimate the trend in the elasticity of children’s economic status with respect to parents’ economic status, and these studies produce conflicting results. In an attempt to reconcile these findings, we use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the...

We analyze changes in the determinants of family income between 1961 and 1999, focusing on the effect of parental education, occupational rank, income, marital status, family size, region of residence, race, and ethnicity. Our data, which cover respondents between the ages of thirty and...

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...

There is growing concern that improving the academic skills of disadvantaged youth is too difficult and costly, so policymakers should instead focus either on vocationally oriented instruction for teens or else on early childhood education. Yet this conclusion may be premature given that so few...

Mounting evidence shows that self-care produces deleterious consequences for adolescents in the U.S. Since desscriptive evidence suggests that maternal employment is the primary explanation for adolescent self-care, maternal employment, it is frequently argued, is harming children. Heretofore,...

We investigate the influence of changes in demography, the strength of the economy, and social policies on teen birth rates in the U.S. from 1981 to 1999, a period of wildly fluctuating rates. We find that demographic and social policy changes largely counteracted one another during this period...

While a considerable amount of research has explored the nature and consequences of childbearing by unmarried young women, little is known about the men who father children with these women. This study uses new data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to describe the economic and...

Beginning in the mid 1980s and extending through the early to mid 1990s, a substantial number of women and children gained eligibility for Medicaid through a series of income-based expansions. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we estimate fertility responses to...