All in the Extended Family: Grandparents, Aunts, and Uncles and Educational Attainment

Previous work on social interactions has analyzed the effects of nuclear family, peer, school, and neighborhood characteristics. This paper complements this research by first showing that individuals from similar nuclear families often differ in extended family member characteristics. It then demonstrates that older extended family members - aunts, uncles, and grandparents – independently affect college attendance probabilities and test score results of their younger relatives. In some cases, the sizes of the estimated effects are large enough to substantially narrow the achievement gap between disadvantaged and other youth.

All in the Extended Family: Grandparents, Aunts, and Uncles and Educational Attainment

Previous work on social interactions has analyzed the effects of nuclear family, peer, school, and neighborhood characteristics. This paper complements this research by first showing that individuals from similar nuclear families often differ in extended family member characteristics. It then demonstrates that older extended family members - aunts, uncles, and grandparents – independently affect college attendance probabilities and test score results of their younger relatives. In some cases, the sizes of the estimated effects are large enough to substantially narrow the achievement gap between disadvantaged and other youth.

Teen Childbearing and Conservative Religious Communities

The importance of neighborhood background characteristics on socioeconomic outcomes is uncertain because some dimensions of neighborhood quality such as social norms and social cohesion are difficult to measure. This paper shows that teen childbearing declines with increases in the fraction of a community’s religious adherents who are Catholics or Conservative Protestants. This finding is not simply due to related differences in local economic costs and benefits or with unobserved family or individual characteristics. Instead the results reflect social norms about teen sexual activity. They indicate that policy choices should take account of the influence of norms on individual behavior.

Job Search Among Informal Contacts

Understanding the role of informal contacts in job search can be important given that roughly half of workers find employment through such sources. Some previous research finds that informal contacts improve labor market outcomes. Other work shows that individuals who found their jobs through friends and relatives had lower wages and less job satisfaction than those who used other methods. In light of the varying effects, the purpose of this paper is to uncover why individuals differ in the types of contacts used to find the jobs that they hold.Job search, Informal contacts

All In The Extended Family: Grandparents and College Attendance

Previous work on social interactions has analyzed the effects of nuclear family, peer, school, and neighborhood characteristics. None has previously demonstrated that grandparents also alter grandchildren's schooling independently of parents. This paper shows that higher years of schooling of grandmothers and grandfathers increase respectively college attendance rates for granddaughters and grandsons. These effects do not simply result from correlation with unobserved parent's characteristics. The paper has methodological implications for measuring the size of background effects and for policies that change outcomes by altering social interactions.

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

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.