When people move from one area to another they typically do so in order to raise their incomes. Economists would like to be able to estimate by how much migrants' incomes do in fact increase as a result of their mobility. Comparison of the incomes of migrants with nonmigrants in a cross section...

How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low-birth-weight children from both...

Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects...

This article uses a new data set to investigate the extent to which differences in work history, on-the-job training, absenteeism, and self-imposed restrictions on work hours and location account for wage differences between the sexes and races. As expected, white men generally had more...

Home-based work differs from other employment because the work site is the home itself. This difference means that the fixed costs of working at home are less than the fixed costs of working on site and that home-based workers may engage in joint market ...

The wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980. It has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools. To test this hypothesis, we assembled data on ...

According to human capital theory, women's work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth. We test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals, both past and prospective, part-time work experience, and working in "male" rather than in "female" jobs...

This paper uses a choice-based model to estimate the effects of a broad set of economic factors, including AFDC benefit levels, husband's earnings, and a woman's wage rate, on the probability of marital dissolution. We find that the probability of divorce is lower for marriages in which the...