According to the family utility function approach, the labor supply functions of married men should differ according to whether their wives also work. In this paper, I explicitly model the switching nature of labor supply while also accounting for the endogeneity of the labor force participation decision of the wife, using an endogenous switching regressions model based on the quadratic family utility function. The model is estimated from a cross section of 1,210 married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

This paper analyzes trends in the skills of immigrants to the US in the post-World War II period. Changes in the supply, demand, and institutional factors determining immigration are analyzed for their implications for immigrant skills. During the past 4 decades immigration has shifted from being predominantly European and Canadian in origin to being predominantly Asian and Latin American, and there have been changes in the criteria for rationing immigration visas. Immigrant skills can be analyzed within the context of a model of the supply of immigrants and the US demand for immigrants. Of the Asian immigrants subject to numerical limitation, the proportion who were occupational preference principals declined from 18.2% in 1970, to 11.9% in 1975, to 8.1% in 1981. A growing stock of the foreign-born population who are illegal aliens may lower immigrant quality; for low-skilled workers in neighboring low-income countries the economic incentives for illegal migration are very large. Immigrants from the UK have the highest annual earnings, with Canadian, other European, South Asian, East Asian, and other American immigrants having successively lower earnings. The Mexicans and the Vietnamese have the lowest earnings. Over the period 1950 to 1980, US immigration changed from primarily drawing immigrants from countries whose nationals have high relative earnings in the US primarily drawing immigrants from countries whose nationals do less well. Recent immigrants are less favorably selected on the basis of their level of schooling. The analysis of the relative earnings of immigrants during the 1970s using 3 data files shows there has been little change for white immigrants, an ambiguous pattern for Mexican immgrants, perhaps a small decline for Cuban immigrants, and a small rise for Asian immigrants. Overall, without returning to rationing by country of origin, public policy could raise immigrant skill levels by changing the balance between kinship and the individual's skills in the rationing of visas.

This paper analyzes the earnings and employment of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and white men born in the United States. The Chinese and Japanese have higher levels of schooling and earnings than white men, and the Japanese work more weeks. Ceteris paribus, there are no substantive group differences in these variables or in returns from schooling. The Filipinos have a lower level of schooling, earnings, employment, and returns from schooling. It is, therefore, not appropriate to view Asian-Americans as a single disadvantaged minority group. Further, the success of the Chinese and Japanese challenges conventional wisdom regarding the consequences of racial discrimination.

It is common practice to use sensible rules of thumb for cleaning data. Measurement error is often the justification for removing (trimming) or recoding (winsorizing) observations where the dependent variable has values that lie outside a specified range. We consider a general measurement error process that nests many plausible models. Analytic results demonstrate that winsorizing and trimming are solutions for a narrow class of error processes. Indeed such procedures can induce or exacerbate bias. Monte Carlo simulations and empirical results demonstrate the fragility of cleaning. Even on root mean square error criteria, we cannot find generalizable justifications for these procedures.

Unique new data from a college with a mandatory work‐study program are used to examine the relationship between working during school and academic performance. Particular attention is paid to the importance of biases that are potentially present because the number of hours that are worked is endogenously chosen by the individual. The results suggest that, even if results appear reasonable, a researcher should be cautious when drawing policy conclusions about the relationship between hours worked and a particular outcome of interest unless he or she is confident that potential problems associated with the endogeneity of hours have been adequately addressed.

This article presents the results of an experimental study investigating the problem of allocating heterogeneous indivisible objects using market-like mechanisms. The object of study is the market for professional baseball players in their free-agent year. We investigate both the current free-agency system and a variant of the current system instituted informally by the teams and ruled illegal by arbitrators. We then propose and test a new alternative matching mechanism, which proves to have quite a few desirable characteristics.

"Birth-order effects are posited by many to affect earnings and schooling. We show how such effects can be interpreted to shift either the earnings possibility frontier for siblings or parental preferences. We find empirical evidence for birth-order effects on (age-adjusted) schooling and on earnings for young U.S. adults, though the latter is not robust for all specifications. The examination of intrahousehold allocations suggests that these birth-order differences occur despite parental preferences or prices by birth order favoring later borns, apparently because of stronger endowment effects that favor first borns."

Studies examining welfare‐to‐work program effectiveness present mixed and sometimes discrepant findings, partly due to research design, data, and methodological limitations. Using administrative data on Missouri and North Carolina welfare recipients, we substantially improve on past estimation approaches to identify the distinct effects of each state’s welfare‐to‐work subprograms—assessment, job search assistance and job readiness training, and more intensive programs designed to augment human capital. More intensive training is associated with greater initial earnings losses but also greater long‐run earnings gains. The negative program impacts we observe in quarters immediately following participation turn positive by the second year after participation.