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...

We document the growth of the NAACP’s local branches from just after its inception to the middle of the 20th century using digitized records from the organization’s archives. We identify some key correlates of county-level activity, concentrating specifically on the explosive growth in...

This article reviews the contributions of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to the study of intergenerational mobility. As the longest running longitudinal household survey in the world, the PSID is ideally suited for studying intergenerational issues. The ability to track individuals as...

This article analyzes what is behind the recent unprecedented rise in long-term unemployment and explains what this rise might imply for the economy going forward. In particular, the authors attribute the sharp increase in unemployment duration in 2009 to especially weak labor demand and, to a...

In this paper, we document the extent to which the sample of the Survey of Income and Program Participation that is matched to the Social Security Administration's administrative earnings records is nationally representative. We conclude that the match bias is small, so selection is not a...

In recent decades, blacks have experienced substantially less upward mobility and substantially more downward mobility from one generation to the next than whites. These results are shown to be highly robust to a variety of measurement issues. The author examines rates of 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...