A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans. However, the impact of immigration on natives in self-employment has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector. We first present a new...

This paper analyzes the probabilistic measures of job insecurity that have recently become available through the nationwide Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE). Since 1994, employed SEE respondents have been asked questions eliciting their expectations of job loss in the coming year and their...

Explanations of organizational behavior provided by economic approaches such as transaction costs are often stretched to subsume situations that inherently contradict baseline economic assumptions. We argue that under conditions where there is little or no market discipline and high human asset...

Congress abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996, and some argue that "Social Security as we know it" is next. This paper shows that a politics of apparent consensus about Social Security has become a politics of clear dissensus. To illustrate the politics of Social Security,...

This paper notes the very low incidence of randomized experiments in research on school reform and claims that the few that have been done are the product of researchers in fields other than education. It seeks to probe why scholars teaching in schools of education do not do experiments. Eight...

In recent decades in the United States, even as inequalities of income and wealth have greatly increased, redistributive programs have tended to be curtailed. In some cases, government policies have begun to exacerbate, rather than moderate, inequality. Since this has occurred under both...

A mother's initiation of welfare receipt is a key event for understanding the dynamics of welfare receipt and the likely consequences of welfare reform legislation passed in 1996. Using 28 years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we conduct a number of related analyses of...

The recent controversy surrounding the confluence of measured intelligence, socioeconomic status and race has focused on establishing and denying causal links between individual attributes. Far less attention has been paid to the institutional structures where the relationships between...

If profit-maximizing firms have limited information about the general productivity of new workers, they may choose to use easily observable characteristics such as years of education to Òstatistically discriminateÓ among workers. The pure credential value of education will depend on how...

Comparing business cycle peaks, the official poverty rate for American children rose from 14.0% in 1969 to 19.6% in 1989. This increase has been widely cited in policy debates, both as evidence that the war on poverty was counterproductive and as evidence that it should be intensified. But this...