There are numerous widely recognized advantages to pursuing post-secondary education. Yet colleges offer students different resources and educational experiences, which may introduce inequality in the returns to college enrollment. This dissertation uses nationally representative data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS:2002) and the 1997…

A study attempted to identify low-wage workers in the United States by providing a statistical portrait of all workers who made less than $6.25 per hour in 1993. Data for the analysis were gathered from a cross-section of the Merged Outgoing Rotation Group File--Current Population Survey (CPS) for 1993 and panel data from the National Longitudinal…

This study investigates the impact of employment status and work conditions on the quality of the home environment provided by single mothers of preschool-age children. Multivariate analyses were conducted using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The results indicate that employment status is not a significant predictor of the…

The changes in career development and upward mobility in response to recent changes in the U.S. labor market were examined in a study that included an analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Analysis of the data, which covered the period 1966-1994, established that the…

In this article, we explore the use of Facebook targeted advertisements for the collection of survey data. We illustrate the potential of survey sampling and recruitment on Facebook through the example of building a large employee--employer linked data set as part of The Shift Project. We describe the workflow process of targeting, creating, and…

Vocational education is a large part of the high school curriculum, yet we have little understanding of what drives vocational enrollment or whether these courses help or harm early careers. To address this deficiency, we develop a framework for curriculum choice, taking into account ability and preferences for academic and vocational work. We…

This report revisits the debate about why social mobility levels are relatively low in Great Britain and the United States of America compared to other countries. It focuses on three main areas within this debate: (1) the changing role of educational inequalities; (2) the expectation of ever higher levels of education as revealed in increasing…

Helping young people prepare to engage in work and life as productive adults is a central challenge for any society. Yet, many young people in the United States find that the path from education to employment and economic security in adulthood is poorly marked or inaccessible. As a result, those from low-income and less educated families have…

It is commonly understood that education is one of the most reliable paths to economic security-- particularly for Black and Latinx people and for people from low-wealth families. But it is less well known that the greatest unmet labor market demand is for workers with "middle skills," who have some postsecondary training but not a…

Using a hazards framework and panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2004), we analyze the fertility patterns of a recent cohort of white and black women in the United States. We examine how completed fertility varies by women's education, differentiating between intended and unintended births. We find that the education…

Notwithstanding the astonishing growth in college enrollments, high school remains important to workforce entry. This fact is often buried by pronouncements about the primacy of U.S. higher education--in 2005, for example, 69% of high school graduates went on to college. In the meantime, a restructured economy has replaced unemployment with a form…

Most workers who begin their careers in minimum-wage jobs eventually gain more experience and move on to higher paying jobs. However, more than 8% of workers spend at least half of their first 10 working years in minimum wage jobs. Those more likely to have minimum wage careers are less educated, minorities, women with young children, and those…

This paper examines the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes by exploiting variation in fluoridated water exposure during childhood. The politics surrounding the adoption of water fluoridation by local governments suggests exposure to fluoride is exogenous to other factors affecting earnings. Exposure to fluoridated water increases…

Compares the earnings and work efforts of young nonresidential fathers, residential fathers, and men without children. Results indicate that nonresidential fathers earned less, had lower hourly wages, and worked fewer hours than the other groups of men, primarily because of lower levels of education and job training. (RJM)

Between the later 1960s and early 1990s, young workers experienced declining average real wages and increasing labor market inequality. High-skilled youths--those with a college degree--fare better in this new economy relative to youths with few skills and little formal education. This paper studies two separate, but related, indirect effects of…