I examine the effects of cognitive ability and personality traits on college graduation in a recent cohort of young Americans, and how the returns to these traits vary by family background, and find very substantial differences across family background groups in the personality traits that predict successful completion of college, particularly for men. The implications are twofold. First, the returns to noncognitive traits may be highly context dependent. Second, policy discussion concerning educational inequality should include not just the possibilities for remediating the skill levels of poor children, but also approaches to changing the environments that limit their opportunities.

The term "added worker effect" usually refers to a temporary increase in the labor supply of married women whose husbands have become unemployed. This paper presents a new approach to the empirical study of the added worker effect, which emphasizes the role of employment uncertainty and credit constraints in generating short-run participation and employment patterns. The estimates are based on employment transition probabilities rather than static measures of labor supply and are used in a dynamic simulation of changes in the employment and participation rates of wives following an exogenous increase in unemployment among their husbands. The results show a small but significant added worker effect, at least for white families, and suggest that the apparent disagreement among previous studies may stem from different approaches to measuring responses to a transitory event such as an unemployment spell.

The role of culture in the creation and persistence of racial and ethnic inequalities has been the focus of considerable controversy in the social sciences. In The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, a new book intended for a popular audience, “tiger mom” Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld argue that relatively successful ethnic, religious, and national origin groups in the United States possess a common set of culturally determined traits that drive this success: a sense of group superiority, individual insecurity, and good impulse control. The book is an unscholarly romp through fields of ethnic stereotypes and immigrant anxiety that relies on anecdote, rather than data, and that ignores the selectivity of immigrant flows. In their insistence on the need for the whole triple package, however, the authors raise issues relevant to current research on noncognitive skills—that there are important trait–environment interactions in the determinants of economic success, and that the source and impact of aspirations deserves greater attention.

Labor supply functions for married men and women are formulated as a dynamic simultaneous equations system , which is estimated using panel data. Controlling for fixed individu al effects allows marginal labor supply responses to be disentangled from permanent patterns in hours worked due to assortative mating. Th e results suggest that the labor supply of husbands and wives without preschool children is not jointly determined in the short run, while families with young children exhibit strong interactions in work hou rs and negative cross-earnings effects. Neither the joint utility mod el of family labor supply nor an ad hoc "traditional family" model is supported by these results.

In the standard model of labor supply, each worker is a price taker, where the relevant price is an hourly wage rate which is fixed in the short run, and which does not depend upon the number of hours supplied.With this basic assumption, the wage can be regarded as exogenous for the purpose of estimating a labor supply function.This paper proposes and implements a pair of tests for the exogeneity of wages in a longitudinal labor supply model, and for the particular failure of exogeneity associated with jobs that offer wage-hour packages.The first test is very simple--it amounts to a test of whether hours Granger-cause wages at the individual level.The second test involves a simultaneous estimation of labor supply and wage offer equations.Both tests indicate that the offered wage is related to hours worked, though the offer locus is, for this sample, very flat.The principal conclusion is that labor supply equations cannot properly be estimated in isolation from the process generating wages, even when long time series are available on a sample of individuals.

We develop an empirical model of adolescent premarital childbearing in which a woman's decisions affect a sequence of outcomes: premarital pregnancy, pregnancy resolution, and the occurrence of marriage before the birth. State welfare, abortion, and family planning policies alter the costs and benefits of these outcomes. For white adolescents welfare, abortion, and family planning policy variables have significant effects on these outcomes consistent with theoretical expectations. Black adolescents' behavior shows no association with the policy variables. The different racial results may reflect differences in sample size or important unmeasured racial differences in factors that influence fertility and marital behavior.

In this paper, we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men's labor supply and hourly wage rates. The responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the PSID sample are examined separately, and we use fixed-effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts. Most notably, men's labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters.

In this paper we discuss some simple noncooperative models of distribution within marriage in which the equilibria are not necessarily Pareto optimal, in which history and culture can affect which equilibrium is realized, and in which distribution may depend on whether resources are controlled by the husband or by the wife. Recent moves away from single-decision-maker models of the family have permitted economists to address distribution within marriage, and cooperative-bargaining models have played the central role in these moves. The next step is to permit strategic interaction between family members, by modeling distribution within marriage as a noncooperative game. Noncooperative game theory allows great flexibility in specifying the rules of the game and, unlike cooperative game theory, imposes few a priori restrictions on the nature of equilibrium outcomes. In particular, noncooperative models neither assume nor imply that all equilibria are Pareto optimal.