Previous studies, relying on short-term averages of fathers' earnings, have estimated the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in earnings to be approximately 0.4. Due to persistent transitory fluctuations, these estimates have been biased down by approximately 30% or more. Using administrative...

The authors explore the entire construction sector, as well as the different classes of workers employed by it, to see how much it may be contributing to the recent slowdown in productivity growth.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, the author investigates how much of the cyclicality in unemployment is due to variation in the job finding rate versus the job separation rate. In addition, the article explores how employment dynamics have...

A large literature documents the significant gap in average test scores between blacks and whites, while a related literature finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980’s, and a stagnation in convergence during the 1990’s. We use two data sources the Long Term Trends NAEP and...

This study uses a new data set that contains the Social Security earnings histories of parents and children in the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation, to measure the intergenerational elasticity in earnings in the United States. Earlier studies that found an intergenerational...

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 analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example features the optimal use of credit cards for convenience transactions after a balance transfer and the second involves a financial mistake on...

This paper uses the Islamic holy month of Ramadan as a natural experiment in diurnal fasting and fetal health. Among births to Arab parents in Michigan, we find prenatal exposure to Ramadan results in lower birth weight. Exposure in the first month of gestation also reduces the number of male...