Census's Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) nearly doubles the elderly poverty rate compared to the "Official" Poverty Measure (OPM), a result of the SPM subtraction of medical out-of-pocket (MOOP) expenditures from income. Neither the SPM nor OPM counts health benefits or assets as resources....

We explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross-sectional relationships between marriage, motherhood, and wages. We find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the quot;directquot; effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and...

We use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women. This analysis yields evidence of biases in OLS estimates of wage equations for white and black women, some of which are detected only when these two sources of bias are...

In The Bell Curve Herrnstein and Murray argue that a youth's intelligence (IQ) is a more important determinant of social and economic success in adulthood than is the socioeconomic status (SES) of his or her parents. Herrnstein and Murray base this conclusion on comparison of effects of IQ score...

We assess the evidence on the contribution of changes in the population age structure to the changing fortunes of youths in labor markets in advanced economies over the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and use this evidence to project the likely effects of future cohort sizes on youth labor...

Teen childbearing is commonly viewed as an irrational behavior that leads to long-term socioeconomic disadvantage for mothers and their children. Cross-sectional studies that estimate relationships between maternal age at first birth and socioeconomic indicators measured later in life form the...

US Census Bureau poverty measures do not include an explicit need for health care or insurance nor do they consider health insurance benefits to be resources. Consequently, they cannot measure the direct impact of health insurance benefits on poverty. This paper reviews conceptual and practical...