In recent decades, blacks have experienced substantially less upward mobility and substantially more downward mobility from one generation to the next than whites. These results are shown to be highly robust to a variety of measurement issues. The author examines rates of intergenerational...

This article presents evidence on long-term trends in intergenerational economic mobility in the United States and considers the prospects for intergenerational mobility going forward.

This article reviews the concept of skills mismatch in the labor market and examines its role in explaining ongoing low levels of hiring and high levels of unemployment during the current economic recovery.

A major benefit of health insurance coverage is that it protects the insured from unexpected medical costs that may devastate their personal finances. In this paper, we use detailed credit report information on a large panel of individuals to examine the effect of a major health care reform in...

This article presents evidence relating cross-country differences in intergenerational mobility to differences in inequality of skills.

We investigate sibling correlations in health status using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Bayesian methods that allow us to estimate the covariance structure of a system of latent variable equations. Across a battery of outcomes, we estimate that between 50% and 60% of health status can...

We estimate the association between parental earnings and a wide variety of indicators of child well-being using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to administrative earnings records from the Social Security Administration. We find that the use of longer time...

We review the literature on how parental investments respond to health endowments at birth. Recent studies have combined insights from an earlier theoretical literature on how households allocate resources within the family, with a growing empirical literature that identifies early life health...