Teen Childbearing and Community Religiosity

This paper shows that communities with larger fractions of Catholics and Conservative Protestants have lower rates of teen childbearing ceteris paribus. The pattern of results does not appear to result from spurious correlation with unobservables but rather can be explained by a modified version of Akerlof’s conformity model. This research suggests that community variables that may affect individuals extend beyond the standard measures of neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics. It provides indirect evidence in favor of policy interventions that explicitly seek to alter attitudes and norms rather than relying solely on providing information or structuring financial incentives to change behavior.

Some Job Contacts are More Equal Than Others: Earnings and Job Information Networks

There is considerable disagreement about the effects of informal contacts on earnings. Some researchers report higher earnings for those who found their jobs through such contacts, some report lower earnings, and some report no effects. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to address this issue. When contact effects for young male and female workers were measured in the aggregate, those who found their jobs through informal contacts fared no better than those using formal methods. However, if subgroup contact effects were measured, those who found their jobs through prior-generation male relatives most likely to convey high quality information to employers and workers earned at least 13 percent more than those using formal and other informal methods. This means that job network analyses should not focus exclusively on the use of informal contacts but should distinguish between contacts based on what they can potentially provide for jobseekers.

Job Tenure and Personal Contacts: Good Matches or Limited Choices?

This paper contends that there is an alternative explanation of the positive relationship between using informal contacts and job tenure for some young men. Lower wages, wage growth, and expected job tenure may characterize those using contacts with little clout in the market. In such cases, the correlation between informal contacts and job tenure should not be interpreted as evidence of better match quality. Workers with poor quality personal contacts may rely on informal information sources only as a last resort when they are unable to find lucrative jobs through other means. Such workers would remain at their current jobs mainly because they have limited alternative choices rather than because of better match quality.

Am I Still Too Black For You?: Schooling and Secular Change in Skin Tone Effects

Analysts disagree about whether the Civil Rights/Black Power eras lessened the influence of skin tone on education. The paper finds that, holding family background constant, the educational disadvantages of dark and very dark blacks persisted between younger and older age cohorts. On the other hand, younger medium skin blacks no longer achieved less schooling than their lighter skin counterparts. This paper implies that, without the decline in skin tone effects for medium brown blacks, the racial gap between age cohorts would have remained larger.Human Capital

College Schooling for Grandchildren and Contact with Grandparents

Previous work on social interactions analyzed the effects of nuclear family, peer, school, and neighborhood characteristics. This is the first paper showing that, independent of unobserved parent's characteristics, higher years of grandparents' schooling increase college attendance rates for grandchildren. The paper implies that background effects are more pervasive and longer-lasting than previously believed. It also suggests that some policies aimed at reducing inequality may be less effective than initially hypothesized.

Effects of Mother's Home Time on Children's Schooling.

In order to determine the importance of parental time inputs in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, previous work relies on proxies such as family size, birth order, maternal employment, and retrospective reports of child care time. This paper is unique in finding a connection between more direct measures of mother's child-care time and children's outcomes as adults. It shows that (1) higher home productivity increases, but higher opportunity costs reduce, maternal child-care time and (2) greater child-care time of highly-educated, but not of less well-educated, mothers significantly raises children's years of schooling. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.