We investigate the potential role of fathers in females' decision to choose a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) major in college. The main innovation of our paper is to analyze how sibling sex composition affects the probability of being a STEM major in college for females...

This paper studies the occupational selection among generations of immigrants in the United States and links their choices to the occupational wage distribution in their country of origin. The empirical results suggest that individuals are more likely to take up an occupation in the US that was...

Using linked records from the 1880 to 1940 full-count United States decennial censuses, we estimate the effects of parental exposure to compulsory schooling (CS) laws on the human capital outcomes of children, exploiting the staggered roll-out of state CS laws in the late nineteenth and early...

Using linked records from the 1880 to 1940 full-count United States decennial censuses, we estimate the effects of parental exposure to compulsory schooling (CS) laws on the human capital outcomes of children, exploiting the staggered roll-out of state CS laws in the late nineteenth and early...

We estimate the intergenerational effects of compulsory schooling (CS) laws in the United States (1875 to 1940), exploiting the staggered roll-out of state CS laws and using difference-in-differences and instrumental variable (IV) approaches in a linked panel of full-count US census data....

This paper reviews research about the intergenerational transmission of poverty in industrialized countries. In order to make our survey manageable, we restrict attention to studies that consider the relationship between parental poverty (or ?income?) during childhood and laterlife outcomes; we...

This paper explores a novel mechanism of gender identity formation. Specifically, we explore how the work behavior of a teenager's own mother, as well as that of her friends' mothers, affect her work decisions in adulthood. The first mechanism is commonly included in economic models. The second,...

Recent studies use names—first and surnames—to estimate intergenerational mobility in sources that lack direct family links. While generating novel evidence on intergenerational transmission processes, it remains unclear how different estimators compare and how reliable they are. This paper...