long term intergenerational persistence of human capital an empirical analysis of four generations most previous studies of intergenerational transmission of human capital are restricted to two generations how parents influence their children in this study we use a swedish data set that links individual measures of lifetime earnings for three generations and data on educational attainment for four generations we find that estimates obtained from data on two generations severely underestimate long run intergenerational persistence in both labor earnings and educational attainments long run social mobility is hence much lower than previously thought we attribute this additional persistence to dynastic human capital the influence on human capital of more distant family members than parents

education social mobility and religious movements the islamic revival in egypt muslim societies have been reshaped in recent decades by an islamic revival we document a contemporaneous decline in social mobility among educated youth in egypt the epicentre of the movement in the arab world we then develop a model to show how an unexpected decline in social mobility combined with inequality can produce a religious revival led by the educated middle class the principal idea is that religion helps individuals to cope with unfulfilled aspirations by adjusting their expectations based reference point by raising aspirations economic development may make societies more prone to religious revivals this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

nation building through compulsory schooling during the age of mass migration why did america introduce compulsory schooling laws at a time when financial investments in education and voluntary school attendance were high we provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that states adopted compulsory schooling laws as a nation building tool to instil civic values to the culturally diverse migrants during the age of mass migration between 1850 and 1914 we show the adoption of compulsory schooling laws occurred significantly earlier in states that hosted european migrants with lower exposure to civic values in their home countries using cross county data we show that these migrants had significantly lower demand for american schooling pre compulsion

are church and state substitutes evidence from the 1996 welfare reform abstract churches provide community services similar to those provided by the government but there has been no convincing analysis of the extent to which church activity can substitute for government activity to address this important issue this paper uses a new panel data set of presbyterian church usa congregations to regress both church member donations and a church s community spending on a number of variables including government welfare expenditures a provision of the 1996 welfare law that decreased the availability and use of welfare services by non citizens serves as an instrument to identify the causal effect of government spending on church activity the results show that church activities substitute for government activities extrapolating the findings to all denominations the estimated crowd out effect lies between 20 and 38 cents on the dollar the results are subjected to a number of robustness tests

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

the relative quality of foreign educated nurses in the united states we examine the relative quality of foreign educated nurses using wages as a measure of skill philippine educated nurses enjoy a wage premium that is not explained by observed differences in worker or job characteristics we reconcile the results with a roy model featuring endogenous skill acquisition and provide some empirical evidence of double selection into nursing and migration our results suggest that the wage premium is likely driven by strong positive selection into nursing among filipinos resulting from high and heterogeneous returns to the occupation due to active government support for nurse migration in the philippines

a wallet full of calories the effect of financial dissatisfaction on the desire for food energy this study shows that people experiencing financial dissatisfaction may choose and consume food for its energy value because money and food are closely related exchangeable resources financially dissatisfied people may be motivated to replenish their need for financial resources by consuming caloric resources or food energy five experiments provide support for this hypothesis across various measures of caloric desire and actual eating behavior the findings have notable implications for marketing and public policy whereas marketing researchers have increasingly investigated the interplay of taste and health considerations in food consumption this research demonstrates the importance of investigating food energy considerations

property rights land liquidity and internal migration in the early twentieth century a large number of households resettled from the european to the asian part of the russian empire we propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 stolypin land titling reform one might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area however this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs treating the reform as a quasi natural experiment we employ difference in differences analysis on a panel of province level data that describe migration and economic conditions we find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration to verify the land liquidity effect we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform this direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18 of migration during this period

birth order schooling and earnings birth order effects are posited by many to affect earnings and schooling we show how such effects can be interpreted to shift either the earnings possibility frontier for siblings or parental preferences we find empirical evidence for birth order effects on age adjusted schooling and on earnings for young u s adults though the latter is not robust for all specifications the examination of intrahousehold allocations suggests that these birth order differences occur despite parental preferences or prices by birth order favoring later borns apparently because of stronger endowment effects that favor firstborns

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

the effect of education on religion evidence from compulsory schooling laws abstract for over a century social scientists have debated how educational attainment impacts religious belief in this paper i use canadian compulsory schooling laws to identify the relationship between completed schooling and later religiosity i find that higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious affiliation later in life an additional year of education leads to a 4 percentage point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition this is a reasonably large effect extrapolating the results to the broader population would suggest that increases in schooling could explain most of the large rise in non affiliation in canada in recent decades

job loss and regional mobility we study the migration behavior of displaced workers and find that job displacement increases regional mobility we find however that noneconomic factors such as family ties are very important

market transition industrialization and social mobility trends in postrevolution china1 this study examines trends in intergenerational class mobility in china by analyzing six comparable nationally representative surveys between 1996 and 2012 defying a simplistic unidirectional ac

goal reversion in consumer choice how do consumers manage goal conflicts before making a choice this question was studied by examining emerging preferences in choices involving two products that were means to conflicting goals these preference patterns revealed that an initially active goal which had been set aside to reconcile a goal conflict exerted greater than expected influence on the remainder of the choice process this influence was manifest in a tendency for consumers to revert to the product aligned with the initially active goal upon seeing information that objectively favored neither product the prevalence of the reversion i e flip flop preference pattern suggests that activation of a set aside goal escalates when it is set aside much as if its pursuit had been impeded by an external force in addition to revealing goal reversion in a variety of choice contexts the studies in this article also find that goal reversion is moderated by goal conflict

self selection of emigrants theory and evidence on stochastic dominance in observable and unobservable characteristics the roy model has more precise predictions about the self selection of migrants than previously realised the conditions shown to result in positive or negative selection in terms of expected earnings also imply a stochastic dominance relationship between the earnings distributions of migrants and non migrants we test these predictions using the danish full population administrative data we find strong evidence of positive self selection of emigrants in terms of pre emigration earnings and residual earnings the income distribution for the migrants almost stochastically dominates the distribution for the non migrants decomposing the self selection in total earnings reveals that unobserved abilities play the dominant role

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

europe s tired poor huddled masses self selection and economic outcomes in the age of mass migration during the age of mass migration 1850 1913 one of the largest migration episodes in history the united states maintained a nearly open border allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions we estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection by comparing norway to us migrants with their brothers who stayed in norway in the late nineteenth century we also compare fathers of migrants and nonmigrants by wealth and occupation we find that the return to migration was relatively low 70 percent and that migrants from urban areas were negatively selected from the sending population keep ancient lands your storied pomp cries she with silent lips give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these the homeless tempest tost to me i lift my lamp beside the golden door emma lazarus 1883

comparative social mobility revisited models of convergence and divergence in 16 countries this paper reanalyzes 3 stratum intergenerational mobility classifications assembled by hazelrigg and garnier for men in 16 countries in the 1960s and 1970s log linear and log multiplicative models are used to compare mobility regimes and to estimate effects of industrialization educational enrollment social democracy and income inequality on immobility and other parameters of the mobility process several models of mobility fit the data equally well so criteria of plausibility and parsimony are applied to choose one model of stratum specific immobility and another model of vertical mobility with uniform immobility we find substantial similarity in mobility and immobility across countries but the exogenous variables do explain systematic differences among countries cross national variations are complex because most of the exogenous variables have different effects on different parameters of the mobility regime relative to other factors industrialization and education have weaker effects on mobility regimes than has usually been supposed

the transmission of inequality across multiple generations testing recent theories with evidence from germany this article shows that across multiple generations the persistence of occupational and educational attainment in germany is larger than estimates from two generations suggest we consider two recent interpretations first we assess gregory clark s hypotheses that the true rate of intergenerational persistence is higher than the observed rate as high as 0 75 and time invariant our evidence supports the first but not the other two hypotheses second we test for independent effects of grandparents we show that the coefficient on grandparent status is positive in a wide class of markovian models and present evidence against its causal interpretation

long run cultural divergence evidence from the neolithic revolution this paper investigates the long run influence of the neolithic revolution on contemporary cultural norms as reflected in the dimension of collectivism individualism we present a theory of agricultural origins of cultural divergence where we claim that the advent of farming in a core region was characterized by collectivist values and eventually triggered the out migration of individualistic farmers towards more and more peripheral areas this migration pattern caused the initial cultural divergence which remained persistent over generations using detailed data on the date of adoption of neolithic agriculture among western regions and countries the empirical findings show that the regions which adopted agriculture early also value obedience more and feel less in control of their lives the findings add to the literature by suggesting the possibility of extremely long lasting norms and beliefs influencing today s socioeconomic outcomes

shocking behavior random wealth in antebellum georgia and human capital across generations does the lack of wealth constrain parents investments in the human capital of their descendants we conduct a nearly fifty year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families we track descendants of participants in georgia s cherokee land lottery of 1832 in which nearly every adult white male in georgia took part winners received close to the median level of wealth a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children s human capital although winners had slightly more children than non winners they did not send them to school more sons of winners have no better adult outcomes wealth income literacy than the sons of non winners and winners grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non winners grandchildren this suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines

the economic payoff of name americanization we provide the first evidence of the magnitude and consequences of the americanization of migrants names in the early twentieth century we construct a longitudinal data set of naturalization records tracking migrants and their naming choices over time we consistently find that migrants who americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading than those who did not name americanization embodies an intention to assimilate among low skilled migrants and reveals the existence of preferences for american names within the labor market we conclude that the trade off between individual identity and labor market success was present then as it is today

cross country differences in intergenerational earnings mobility international studies of the extent to which economic status is passed from one generation to the next are important for at least two reasons first each study of a particular country characterizes an important feature of that country s income inequality second comparisons of intergenerational mobility across countries may yield valuable clues about how income status is transmitted across generations and why the strength of that intergenerational transmission varies across countries the e rst section of this paper explains a benchmark measure of intergenerational mobility commonly used in u s studies the second section summarizes comparable empirical e ndings that have accumulated so far for countries other than the united states the third section sketches a theoretical framework for interpreting cross country differences in intergenerational mobility

the institutional foundations of religious politics evidence from indonesia this paper explores the foundations of religious influence in politics and society we show that an important islamic institution fostered the entrenchment of islamism at a critical juncture in indonesia the world s largest muslim country in the early 1960s rural elites transferred large amounts of land into waqf inalienable charitable trusts in islamic law to avoid expropriation by the state regions facing a greater threat of expropriation exhibit more prevalent waqf land and islamic institutions endowed as such including mosques and religious schools these endowments provided conservative forces with the capital needed to promote islamist ideology and mobilize against the secular state we identify lasting effects of the transfers on the size of the religious sector electoral support for islamist parties and the adoption of local sharia laws these effects are shaped by greater demand for religion in government but not by greater piety among the electorate waqf assets also impose costs on the local economy particularly in agriculture where these endowments are associated with lower productivity overall our findings shed new light on the origins and consequences of islamism

the selection of high skilled emigrants we measure selection among high skilled emigrants from germany using predicted earnings migrants to less equal countries are positively selected relative to nonmigrants while migrants to more equal countries are negatively selected consistent with the prediction in borjas 1987 positive selection to less equal countries reflects university quality and grades and negative selection to more equal countries reflects university subject and gender migrants to the united states are highly positively selected and concentrated in stem fields our results highlight the relevance of the borjas model for high skilled individuals when credit constraints and other migration barriers are unlikely to be binding

intergenerational mobility in norway 1865 2011 there are large differences in intergenerational mobility between countries little is known however about how persistent such differences are and how they evolve over time this paper constructs a data set of 835 537 linked father son pairs from census records and documents a substantial increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in norway between 1865 and 2011 the increase is most pronounced in non farm occupations the findings show that long run mobility developments previously described for the us and uk are not necessarily representative for other countries and that high mobility in a given country today need not reflect high mobility before industrialization

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 abstract the us tolerates more inequality than europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than europe s though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century we extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10 000 nationally representative british and us fathers and sons the us was more mobile than britain through 1900 so in the experience of those who created the us welfare state in the 1930s the us had indeed been exceptional the us mobility lead over britain was erased by the 1950s as us mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels jel j62 n31 n32 n33 n34

immigrants and the making of america we study the effects of european immigration to the u s during the age of mass migration 1850 1920 on economic prosperity exploiting cross county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income less poverty less unemployment higher rates of urbanization and greater educational attainment today the long run effects seem to capture the persistence of short run benefits including greater industrialization increased agricultural productivity and more innovation

social mobility and redistributive politics just like economists voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently we model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs in the long run left wing dynasties believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with right wing dynasties this allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attiitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries

the effect of sibling sex composition on women s education and earnings this paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the united states between 1920 and 1965 we examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl s siblings on that child s educational attainment we find that throughout the century women s educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings and that men s choices have not women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters controlling for household size since sibling sex composition affects women s educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women

international migration and the role of institutions we study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals we evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants for a dataset on 19th century migration we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role but that the quality of institutions also matter we produce evidence that both political and migration institutions represent significant factors of attraction even after controlling for their potential endogeneity through a set of instruments exploiting colonial history and the institutions inherited from the past

mother s education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital evidence from college openings we examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1999 we also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes use of prenatal care smoking marriage and fertility in an effort to account for the endogeneity of education attainment we use data about the availability of colleges in the womans country in her 17th year as an instrument for maternal education we find that higher maternal education improves infant health as measured by birth weight and gestational age it also increases the probability that a new mother is married reduces parity increases use of prenatal care and reduces smoking suggesting that may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return

economic interpretations of intergenerational correlations science itself for example see galton s 1869 study of the eminence of relatives or his 1889 analysis of the heights of parents and children but extensive use of economic theory to interpret these correlations is much more recent using basic economic concepts such as supply demand investment incentives missing markets and so on theorists hope to explain how and why status is correlated across generations economic theory might provide a unified treatment of a variety of socioeconomic indicators such as earnings income occupation or wealth or it might predict how taxes subsidies and economic regulation affect intergenerational mobility and the operation of markets however while the subject matter earnings consumption wealth occupa tion is clearly interesting to economists it could nonetheless be the case that beyond basic questions of measurement economic theory has not improved our understanding of intergenerational mobility goldberger 1989 is quite explicit in this contention by emphasizing the distinction between genes and environment and by using statistical theory as its main analytical tool the paper by samuel bowles and herbert gintis in this issue implicitly concurs with goldberger we take this challenge very seriously what characterizes an economic approach to mobility while biologists and bowles and gintis distinguish endowments and investments by their source genetic versus environmental factors one focus of economic theorists is motiva

club goods and group identity evidence from islamic resurgence during the indonesian financial crisis this paper tests a model in which group identity in the form of religious intensity functions as ex post insurance i exploit relative price shocks induced by the indonesian financial crisis to demonstrate a causal relationship between economic distress and religious intensity koran study and islamic school attendance that is weaker for other forms of group identity consistent with ex post insurance credit availability reduces the effect of economic distress on religious intensity religious intensity alleviates credit constraints and religious institutions smooth consumption shocks across households and within households particularly for those who were less religious before the crisis

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 comment using historical census and survey data long and ferrie forthcoming found a significant decline in social mobility in the united states from 1880 to 1973 we present two critiques of the long ferrie study first the data quality of the long ferrie study is more limiting than the authors acknowledge second and more critically they applied a method ill suited for measuring social mobility of farmers in a comparative study between 1880 and 1973 a period in which the proportion of farmers dramatically declined in the u s we show that long and ferrie s main conclusion is all driven by this misleading result for farmers

the evolution of social mobility norway during the twentieth century we document trends in social mobility in norway using intergenerational income elasticities the associations between the income percentiles of fathers and sons and brother correlations the results of all approaches suggest that social mobility increased substantially between cohorts born in the early 1930s and the early 1940s father son associations remained stable for cohorts born after world war ii while brother correlations continued to decline the relationship between father and son income percentile ranks is highly non linear for early cohorts but it approaches linearity over time we discuss increasing educational attainment among low and middle income families as a possible mechanism underlying these trends

intergenerational mobility in the very long run florence 1427 2011 we examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run across generations that are six centuries apart we exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the italian city of florence in 1427 these individuals have been associated using their surnames with their pseudo descendants living in florence in 2011 we find that earnings elasticity is about 0 04 much higher than predicted by traditional models of intergenerational mobility we also find an even stronger role for real wealth inheritance and evidence of persistence in belonging to certain elite professions our results are confirmed when we account for the quality of the pseudo links and when we address the potential selectivity bias due to the differential survival rates across surnames we argue that the quasi immobility of pre industrial society and the positional advantages in the access to certain professions might explain in part the long lasting effects of ancestors socioeconomic status

human capital heterogeneity and estimated degrees of intergenerational mobility we study the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility where heterogeneity in innate earnings ability and parents altruism rate is explicitly modelled we show that heterogeneity increases the difficulty of detecting the existence of borrowing constrained families conversely the presence of heterogeneity means that economic and linear statistical models of inheritance generate similar intergenerational data on consumption and earnings we also suggest that nay cross country differences in intergenerational earnings mobility are more readily interpreted according to the heterogeneity of inherited ability rather than optimal family responses to countiy specific institutions for accumulating human capital the relationship between a citizen s economic status and his family background is an important clue for understanding and evaluating a country s economic performance some eg bowles 1972 have suggested a close relationship between economic status and family background indicates some failure of labour markets or of institutions fostering investment in human capital others eg altonji et al 1992 mulligan 1997 table 4 1 have offered an apparently contradictory suggestion that efficient allocations involve a very close relationship on some measures between the economic status of parents and children still others find family background effects to be the most offensive sources of inequality regardless of whether those effects are consistent with efficiency empirical studies of this relationship date back to the earliest days of statistical social science eg galton s 1869 british study of the success and eminence of relatives and many can be found outside the field of economics see goode s 1966 survey for a few examples but the increasing availability of new data sets for exploring the relationship between earnings income wealth and consumption of parents and years later of adult children has appropriately led to new and better econometric estimates of intergenerational mobility or the intergenerational auto regression of various measures of economic status and has even permitted some careful comparisons of those estimates across countries however fewer results are available on interpreting such estimates in terms of economic models of inheritance or of the labour market loury 1981 and becker and tomes 1986 are among the exceptions where they show how access to capital markets or other means of

parental investment in children s human capital in urban china the present study tests the extent of parental forgone consumption used instead to invest in children s human capital by use of intrahousehold resource allocation models using an unusual comprehensive data set for urban china there is more spending on boys aged 13 to 15 but more on girls aged 16 to 18 suggesting that standard human capital theories and traditional perceptions of gender bias do not completely explain educational expenditure decisions the evidence from urban china is consistent though with human capital models which consider parental intertemporal preferences also the findings suggest that the perceived bias in favour of sons exists weakly in contemporary urban china

dynasties in professions and the role of rents and regulation evidence from italian pharmacies abstract this paper provides causal evidence concerning the role of rents in explaining dynasties in professions it focuses on the italian pharmacist labor market and exploits discontinuities established by law in the relationship between the number of pharmacies that should serve a city and the population using a regression discontinuity design it shows that a reduction in rent proxied by the pharmacy to population ratio has a significant and negative impact on the propensity of pharmacists children to follow their parents career in contrast pharmacy rents do not affect the career choices of non pharmacists children who face higher entry barriers i e they do not inherit the family business further evidence shows that rents and lower exposure to competition are associated with stronger family ties also among other professions and within firms

gifts of the immigrants woes of the natives lessons from the age of mass migration in this article i jointly investigate the political and the economic effects of immigration and study the causes of anti immigrant sentiments i exploit exogenous variation in european immigration to u s cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by world war i and the immigration acts of the 1920s and instrument immigrants location decision relying on pre existing settlement patterns i find that immigration triggered hostile political reactions such as the election of more conservative legislators higher support for anti immigration legislation and lower redistribution exploring the causes of natives backlash i document that immigration increased natives employment spurred industrial production and did not generate losses even among natives working in highly exposed sectors these findings suggest that opposition to immigration was unlikely to have economic roots instead i provide evidence that natives political discontent was increasing in the cultural differences between immigrants and natives results in this article indicate that even when diversity is economically beneficial it may nonetheless be socially hard to manage

earnings distribution of cuban immigrants in the usa evidence from quantile regression with sample selection abstractthis article analyses the conditional earnings distribution for cuban immigrants in the usa considering buchinsky sample selection in a quantile regression model the test proposed by huber and melly to test the independence between error terms and regressors conditional on the selection probability is also considered this is the first attempt in the migration literature to use quantile regression with sample selection the data used come from the us american community survey the results show that the hypothesis of conditional independence is not rejected and increments in earnings associated with the usual socioeconomic characteristics in labour studies vary between the cohorts considered the main conclusions are that a decline in returns from education may be a sign that a high level of education no longer provides a competitive advantage and that being a black person is associated with substantially lower earnings regardless of the individuals position in the earnings distribution this

in the name of the son and the daughter intergenerational mobility in the united states 1850 1940 this paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the united states using a novel empirical strategy the key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo links across generations we find that both father son and father daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century increased sharply between 1900 and 1920 and declined slightly thereafter we discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development trends in inequality and returns to human capital and the marriage market in explaining these patterns jel d63 j12 j16 j24 j62 n31 n32 the degree to which economic status is passed along generations is key to under standing differences across societies and over time in the extent of inequality a low degree of intergenerational mobility can undermine the notion of equality of opportunity and may lead to persistent inequality recent research reveals that today intergenerational mobility in the united states is lower than in most other developed countries corak 2013 this finding stands in contrast with the national ethos of the united states as the land of unlimited opportunity was this view ever justified in this paper we provide a new perspective on the evolution of intergenerational mobility in the united states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we extend the existing literature by looking at the intergenerational elasticity in economic status between fathers and children of both sexes focusing only on father son cor relations may miss part of the picture daughters should be included if we want to know how the average well being of a generation correlates with that of their parents

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

rise and fall in the third reich social advancement and nazi membership abstract we explore the relationship between nazi membership and social advancement using a unique and highly detailed dataset of the german military during the third reich we find that membership of a nazi organisation is positively related to social advancement when measured by the difference between fathers and sons occupations however we find that this observed difference is mainly driven by individuals with different characteristics self selecting into these organisations rather than from a direct reward to membership this result is supported by an instrumental variable approach that uses the location of catholic priests sympathetic to the nazis as an instrument for nazi membership in addition we explore the determinants of nazi membership we find that ns membership is associated with higher socio economic background and human capital levels in line with occupational choice models of radicalisation

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

coal smoke and mortality in an early industrial economy air pollution was severe in the 19th century yet its health consequences are often overlooked due to a lack of pollution data we offer a new approach for inferring local coal use levels based on local industrial structure and industry specific coal use intensity this allows us to provide the first estimates of the mortality effects of british industrial coal use in 1851 1860 exploiting wind patterns for identification we find that a one standard deviation increase in coal use raised infant mortality by 6 8 and that industrial coal use explains roughly one third of the urban mortality penalty observed during this period this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families lleras muney we estimate the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children s longevity educational attainment nutritional status and income in adulthood to do so we collected individual level administrative records of applicants to the mothers pension program the first government sponsored welfare program in the united states 1911 1935 and matched them to census wwii and death records male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers they also obtained onethird more years of schooling were less likely to be underweight and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers jel i12 i14 i18 i32 i38 j16 n32

the causes and consequences of distinctively black names in the 1960s blacks and whites chose relatively similar first names for their children over a short period of time in the early 1970s that pattern changed dramatically with most blacks particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods adopting increasingly distinctive names but a subset of blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names the patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the black power movement influenced how blacks perceived their identities among blacks born in the last two decades names provide a strong signal of socioeconomic status which was not previously the case we find however no negative relationship between having a distinctively black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child s circumstances at birth

cultural diversity and economic growth evidence from the us during the age of mass migration we exploit the large inflow of immigrants to the us during the 1870 1920 period to examine the effects that within county changes in the cultural composition of the us population had on output growth we construct measures of fractionalization and polarization to distinguish between the different effects of cultural diversity our main finding is that increases in cultural fractionalization significantly increased output while increases in cultural polarization significantly decreased output we address the issue of identifying the causal effects of cultural diversity by using the supply push component of immigrant inflows as an instrumental variable

the economics of temporary migrations many migrations are temporary a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants economic behavior generating possible consequences for nonmigrants in both home and host countries in this paper we provide a thorough examination of the various aspects of temporary migrations that matter for the analysis of economic phenomena we demonstrate the extent of temporary migrations in population movements we show how temporariness can affect the various economic choices and how better data have improved both the measurement of nonpermanent migrations and the analyses of various aspects of migrant behavior we propose a general theoretical framework for modeling temporary migration decisions based on which we outline the various motives for temporariness while simultaneously reviewing related literature and available data sources we discuss the possible consequences of migration temporariness for nonmigrants in both home and host countries jel f22 f24 j11 j61 k37 o15

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

religiosity and state welfare abstract the catholic sex abuse scandals reduced both membership and religiosity in the catholic church because government spending on welfare may substitute for the religious provision of social services we consider whether this plausibly exogenous decline in religiosity affected several measures of the public taste toward government and spending on welfare between 1990 and 2008 in places where there were more scandals individuals state a preference for less government provision of social services in contrast a higher level of abuse is also associated with an increase in voting for democratic candidates for president state legislatures and the us house of representatives and an increase in per capita government welfare spending although this increase is insufficient to replace the decrease in catholic provided charity

intergenerational wealth mobility in england 1858 2012 surnames and social mobility this article uses a panel of 18 869 people with rare surnames whose wealth is observed at death in england and wales 1858 2012 to measure the intergenerational elasticity of wealth over five generations we show using rare surnames to track families that wealth is much more persistent than standard one generation estimates would suggest there is still a significant correlation between the wealth of families five generations apart we show that this finding can be reconciled with standard estimates of wealth mobility by positing an underlying first order markov process of wealth inheritance with an intergenerational elasticity of 0 70 0 75 throughout the years 1858 2012

who leaves deciphering immigrant self selection from a developing country abstract using a novel data set from a developing country the federated states of micronesia fsm i analyze an emigration flow to the united states that has no legal barriers to entry and contains detailed information on the immigrant at home and in the united states i find that highly educated workers relative to the home country average have the highest likelihood of migrating from the fsm to the united states i also compare the premigration wages for the migrants and an observationally equivalent matched nonmigrant group and find that there is a positive and statistically significant difference between the two groups indicating that immigrants are also positively selected on unobserved characteristics the observed selection is consistent with the relatively large differences in home country and destination skill prices at the highest skill levels information on the immigrants characteristics before migration is central to my analysis of determining the nature of immigrant self selection on

are immigrants favorably self selected one of the standard propositions in the migration literature is that migrants tend to be favorably self selected for labor market success that is economic migrants are described as tending on average to be more able ambitious aggressive entrepreneurial or otherwise more favorably selected than similar individuals who choose to remain in their place of origin in recent years there have been challenges to the general proposition of the favorable selectivity of migrants in addressing this issue this paper considers alternative specifications of the migration model that are relevant for the issue of migrant selectivity excerpt

was weber wrong a human capital theory of protestant economic history max weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of protestant regions to a protestant work ethic we provide an alternative theory protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity we test the theory using county level data from late nineteenth century prussia exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the reformation to use distance to wittenberg as an instrument for protestantism we find that protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity but also to better education our results are consistent with protestants higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity

economics religion and culture a brief introduction in this introduction we will avoid laboring over a definition of the economics of religion culture but this will not stop us from arguing that it is a burgeoning area of research work focusing on religious practice and related cultural issues dates back at least to adam smith but until the 1990s there had been little published by mainstream economists in this area recently however a variety of subfields in economics have taken up work here the jel classification code system includes a designation for papers on religion z12 and the american economic association via econlit keeps track of the number of journal articles published under this section of the code in fig 1 we show the number of papers published in this area in recent years as the picture shows there has been a sixfold increase in the total number of papers published in this area over the past decade including a number of truly excellent works some of the topics considered here include studies of how public policy affects attitudes and beliefs studies on the lasting economic implications of historic cultural institutions work on religious schooling versus secular schooling investigations of faith based social service provision work on violence and religious extremism analyses of religious donations and research on the connection between beliefs such as religious beliefs and behaviors

squeezed coping with constraint through efficiency and prioritization when consumers perceive that a resource is limited and may be insufficient to accomplish goals they recruit and enact plans to cope with the shortage we distinguish two common strategies efficiency planning yields savings by stretching the resource whereas priority planning does so by sacrificing less important goals using a variety of methods to explore both financial and time planning we investigate how the two types of planning differ how they vary with constraint and how they interrelate relative to efficiency planning priority planning is perceived as yielding larger one time savings but it feels more costly because it requires trade offs within resource e g money for money as opposed to cross resource e g time for money as constraint increases and greater resource savings are required prioritization becomes more likely however the shift to prioritization is often insufficient and consumers tend to react to insufficient prioritization dysfunctionally making a bad situation worse budgeting helps consumers behave more adaptively budgeters respond to constraint with more priority planning than nonbudgeters and they report fewer dysfunctional behaviors like overspending and impulsive shopping

introduction to the economics of religion after a very long hiatus economists have begun again to study the relationship between economics and religion this article seeks to summarize and evaluate the principal themes and empirical findings that have appeared in some 200 recent papers on the economics of religion although some of the research concerns the economic consequences of religiosity most applies standard economic theory to the study of individual religious activity the characteristics of religious groups and the impact of regulation and competition on religious markets

college choice and wages estimates using data on female twins the authors assess the impact of college quality on women s earnings and the influence of family and individual endowments on college choice using new data from a survey of identical and nonidentical twins born in minnesota the estimates reject models that ignore school choice the statistically preferred estimates suggest that ph d granting private universities with well paid senior faculty and smaller enrollments produce students who have significantly higher earnings later in life both the quantity of schooling and the quality of schooling resources are allocated to higher endowed individuals which exacerbates preexisting inequality in human capital and biases conventional estimates of school quality effects copyright 1996 by mit press

the place premium bounding the price equivalent of migration barriers large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility we use migrant selection theory and evide

the effect of redistribution on migration evidence from the israeli kibbutz this paper tests a key theoretical prediction of public finance that local redistribution induces sorting of the population so that less productive individuals are located in communities with more redistribution specifically i use a longitudinal data set to test whether and to what extent the intensive redistribution practiced by israeli kibbutzim encourages exit of more productive individuals and entry of less productive ones the findings support the theoretical prediction kibbutz leavers are more skilled than both stayers and other rural migrants and they earn higher wages upon exit than observably similar city natives and other migrants in contrast individuals who earn lower wages in the city are more likely to enter a kibbutz but they are not more likely to move to other rural areas these findings also support borjas hypothesis that migrants self selection depends on the difference in returns to skills between the origin and the destination

what do twins studies reveal about the economic returns to education a comparison of australian and us findings conventional estimates of rates of return to education are constrained because they are unable to isolate the returns to schooling from the contribution of individual ability and the influence of family background potentially studies using a sample of twins may overcome these problems monozygotic twins are genetically identical and if they have been reared together share the same family background differences in income between identical twins can therefore be associated with differences in the amount of education they have undertaken in order to estimate the independent influence of education comparisons of such estimates with estimates made from a sample of dizygotic twins who are genetically similar but not identical and who are also reared together may permit evaluation of the biases associated with ability and family background in conventional estimates of the return to education in an important paper jere behrman et al 1977 analyzed data from a sample of male world war ii veteran twins and found that of the overall rate of return to schooling of 8 percent 2 7 percentage points could be attributed to schooling per se 3 2 percentage points could be attributed to genetic factors and 2 1 percentage points could be attributed to shared family environment in a recent paper however orley ashenfelter and alan krueger 1994 have estimated the economic returns to education using data on a new sample of twins which permitted them to adjust their estimate for omitted ability variables and measurement error on this basis they find that family and genetic effects make virtually no contribution to the returns to schooling measurement error however biases the estimated return to schooling downward the findings of ashenfelter and krueger 1994 are very different from previous work in this field and there is now some confusion as to what analysis of twins data really reveals about the economic returns to schooling ashenfelter and krueger s results are based on analysis of data for a sample of 298 individuals 149 pairs of identical twins who attended a twins festival in 1991 they remark at the end of their paper only additional data collection is likely to lead to better estimates of the returns to schooling p 1171

intergenerational wealth mobility and the role of inheritance evidence from multiple generations this study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid life wealth across three generations and a young fourth generation and examines how much of the parent child association that can be explained by inheritances using a swedish data set we find parent child rank correlations of 0 3 0 4 and grandparents grandchild rank correlations of 0 1 0 2 conditional on parents wealth grandparents wealth is weakly positively associated with grandchild s wealth and the parent child correlation is basically unchanged if we control for grandparents wealth bequests and gifts strikingly account for at least 50 per cent of the parent child wealth correlation while earnings and education are only able to explain 25 per cent

access to citizenship and the economic assimilation of immigrants immigrants often have lower employment rates and earnings than natives our empirical analysis relies on two reforms generating exogenous variation in the waiting time for citizenship we find that faster access to citizenship improves the economic situation of immigrant women especially their labour market attachment with higher employment rates longer working hours and more stable jobs immigrants also invest more in host country specific skills like language and vocational training faster access to citizenship seems a powerful policy instrument to boost economic integration in countries with traditionally restrictive citizenship policies

an investigation of the labor market earnings of panamanian males evaluating sources of inequality this paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of labor market earnings and inequality for males in panama using newly available microdata we estimate earnings equations based on the measurement framework of mincer 1974 and compare them with those for other countries at various stages of economic development we present evidence on two aspects of inequality in less developed economies labor market segmentation and social stratification we present tests of the segmentation hypothesis including several of the dual labor market hypotheses and discuss their inherent ambiguity we also present evidence on the importance of family background for earnings determination and educational attainment

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

the effects of education and family planning programs on fertility in indonesia abstract numerous studies indicate that female education is a major determinant of fertility and that the estimated effects are large relative to other variables including family planning program variables there are however two serious deficiencies in the research relating educational attainment to fertility that could give rise to invalid inferences first many public programs including health and family planning programs may influence a woman s decisions about education and these indirect programmatic effects might be large second nearly all existing studies of the impacts of education on fertility assume that a woman s educational attainment is exogenous education could be serving as a proxy for such unobservable determinants as ability motivation and parental background as these factors most likely are important determinants of a woman s educational attainment we use the 1993 indonesian family life survey to compare the estimated impacts of education on fertility from a simple model tha

immigrants genes genetic diversity and economic development in the united states this paper examines the relationship between immigrants genetic diversity and economic development in the united states during the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries a period commonly referred to as the age of mass migration from europe to the new world our panel model estimates show that during this period immigrants genetic diversity is significantly positively correlated with measures of u s counties economic development there exists also a significant positive relationship between immigrants genetic diversity in 1870 and contemporaneous measures of u s counties average income jel j11 o51 z13

the devaluation effect activating a need devalues unrelated objects it is commonly assumed that an object capable of satisfying a need will be perceived as subjectively more valuable as the need for it intensifies for example the more active the need to eat the more valuable food will become this outcome could be called a valuation effect in this article we suggest a second basic influence of needs on evaluations that activating a focal need e g to eat makes objects unrelated to that need e g shampoo less valuable an outcome we refer to as the devaluation effect two existing studies support the existence of a devaluation effect using manipulations of the need to eat and to smoke and measuring attractiveness of consumer products and willingness to purchase raffle tickets furthermore the evidence suggests that consumers are not aware of the devaluation effect and its influence on their preferences

intergenerational occupational mobility in greatbritain and the united states since 1850 comment american economic review 2013 103 5 2021 2040 http dx doi org 10 1257 aer 103 5 2021 intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 comment by michael hout and avery m guest in intergenerational occupational mobility in britain and the united states since 1850 jason long and joseph p ferrie 2013 introduce valuable data on men s intergenerational occupational mobility in the united states and britain for men employed in 1880 or 1881 and compare patterns with those for the same coun tries for men employed in the early 1970s long and ferrie advance three major substantive conclusions i occupational mobility was greater in the united states than in britain in the 1880s this result is consistent as they note with contemporary and current images of an expanding open america and a rigid class conscious victorian england their study is the first to address this issue with such broadly repre sentative data ii the united states became increasingly stratified over the ensuing 90 years decreasing social mobility this contradicts previous research that con cluded that the strength of the intergenerational correlation in the united states either remained constant hauser et al 1975 guest landale and mccann 1989 or fluctuated without a consistent trend upward or downward grusky and fukumoto 1989 at least until the 1960s other research indicated a significant decline in american stratification from 1962 to 1985 featherman and hauser 1978 hout 1984 1988 diprete and grusky 1990 iii britain and the united states were similarly stratified in the 1970s this accords with previous research that used the same original data sources but a broader age range encompassing all men 25 64 years old kerckhoff campbell and winfield laird 1985 yamaguchi 1987 erikson and goldthorpe 1992 xie 1992 goodman and hout 1998 long and ferrie make no direct comparisons between the british mobility patterns in 1881 and 1972 we are motivated to comment by our reanalyses of the published version of long and ferrie s dataset and some other tables that differ in some particulars hout sociology department university of california berkeley 410 barrows hall berkeley ca 94720 1980 e mail mikehout berkeley edu guest university of washington e mail averyguest gmail com go to http dx doi org 10 1257 aer 103 5 2021 to visit the article page for additional materials and author disclosure statement s

international migration self selection and the distribution of wages evidence from mexico and the united states we use the 1990 and 2000 mexican and u s population censuses to test borjas s negative selection hypothesis that the less skilled are those most likely to migrate from countries with high skill premia earnings inequality to countries with low skill premia earnings inequality we find that mexican immigrants in the united states are more educated than nonmigrants in mexico and were mexican immigrants to be paid according to current skill prices in mexico they would be concentrated in the middle of mexico s wage distribution these results are inconsistent with the negative selection hypothesis and instead suggest that there is intermediate selection of immigrants from mexico

brides for sale cross border marriages and female immigration every year a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in east asia this phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed asian countries this paper argues that two factors account for this rapid increase in bride importation the rapid growth of women s educational attainment and a cultural norm that leads to a low net surplus of marriage for educated women we provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical model and its implications using datasets from japan korea singapore and taiwan