Research Inequality

This paper examines changes in the earnings distribution of men age 25-64 between 1960 and 2000 in Appalachia and in the remainder of the U.S. Because Appalachia is more rural than the remainder of the U.S. we also examine changes in the earnings distribution in rural vs. urban areas. Our central finding is that there have been large differences in the evolution of the earnings distribution in rural vs. urban areas and this is the principal reason that Appalachia’s earnings distribution differs to some degree from the remainder of the U.S. We find that the bottom of the earnings distribution increased in rural counties between 1960 and 1980 while there was a small decrease in the bottom of the earnings distribution in urban areas. Between 1980 and 2000, urban areas exhibited far more bifurcation of earnings than rural areas. The level and the return to education may play an important role in understanding these patterns. At the bottom of the distribution there was a large increase in education in rural areas relative to urban areas between 1980 and 2000. The relative rise at the top of the earnings distribution in cities is likely caused by men in the upper part of the earnings distribution being much more likely to have a college degree combined with a rapid rise in the return to college education.

Despite trends indicating a recent stabilizing in the upward obesity trend for children and adolescents in the U.S., child overweight remains a significant public health issue. Our analysis finds a nonlinear effect – the poorest and wealthiest children in our sample have the lowest BMIs, while the children in the middle of the SES distribution have the highest. Our findings may reflect the fact that younger children are more likely to be physically active than older children and adolescents, and suggest that the relationship between socioeconomic status and physical activity (and overweight) may change during childhood.

There are well-documented and as yet unexplained disparities in birth outcomes by race in the United States, even after controlling for socioeconomic status. This paper examines the sources of disparities in low birth weight between blacks and whites in the U.S., by focusing on differences in disparities between two very distinct geographic areas, the Deep South and the rest of the country. Two findings from prior research drive the analyses: First, health overall is worse in the Deep South states; Second, race disparities are smaller in the Deep South than in the rest of the nation. A number of potential explanations for these findings are examined. Results suggest that, first, almost all of the increased burden of low birth weight in the Deep South states may be explained by differences in race composition and socioeconomic status between the Deep South and rest of the nation. Second, the lower race disparities found between the two regions are being driven by much worse outcomes for white mothers in the Deep South (vs. the rest of the country), particularly for poor whites, as opposed to better outcomes for black mothers. Potential paths for future research are recommended.

There is widespread perception that externalities from troubled children are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children’s school records are matched to domestic violence cases. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers’ reading and math test scores and increase misbehavior in the classroom. The achievement spillovers are robust to within-family differences and when controlling for school-by-year effects, providing strong evidence that neither selection nor common shocks are driving the results.

Despite evidence that skilled labor is increasingly concentrated in cities, whether regional wage inequality is predominantly due to differences in skill levels or returns is unknown. We compare Appalachia, with its wide mix of urban and rural areas, to other parts of the U.S., and find that gaps in both skill levels and returns account for the lack of high wage male workers. For women, skill shortages are important across the distribution. Because rural wage gaps are insignificant, our results suggest that widening wage inequality between Appalachia and the rest of the U.S. owes to a shortage of skilled cities.

English Learners, students who are not proficient in English and speak a non-English language at home, make up more than 10 percent of the nation’s K-12 student body. Achieving proficiency in English for these students is a major goal of both state and federal education policy, motivating the provision of bilingual education policies. Using data for nearly 500,000 English Learners from California, I show that students in bilingual education have substantially lower English proficiency than other English Learners in first and second grades. In contrast, there is little difference between bilingual education and other programs for students in grades three through five. These results hold across fixed effects, propensity score, and instrumental variables models.

We document the demographic and economic forces underlying changes in income inequality among single mother families over the past three decades in the United States. Using decomposable measures of after-tax income-to-needs inequality, we examine within- and between-group inequality based on education attainment, age, past marital status, race, and employment status. We also conduct income factor decompositions to quantify the relative contributions of earnings, transfers, other income, and taxes to inequality. Our results from the March Current Population Survey show that income-to-needs inequality rose nearly 30 percent between 1979 and 2005. The demographic decompositions indicate that most of the change in inequality is occurring within groups, in part because of large, offsetting between-group changes in population shares and relative mean incomes. The most prominent economic factor underlying the rise in income inequality among single mother families is labor-market earnings, the latter of which was induced by rising variance of hourly wages.

This paper uses administrative data from the University of Texas-Austin to examine whether high school peer networks at college entry influence college achievement, measured by grade point average (GPA) and persistence. For each freshman cohort from 1993 through 2003 we calculate the number and ethnic makeup of college freshmen from each Texas high school, which we use as a proxy for freshmen “peer network.” Empirical specifications include high school fixed effects to control for unobservable differences across schools that influence both college enrollment behavior and academic performance. Using an IV/fixed effects strategy that exploits the introduction and expansion of the Longhorn Scholars Program, which targeted low income schools with low college traditions we also evaluate whether “marginal” increases in peer networks influence college achievement. Results show that students with larger peer network upon entering college perform better than their counterparts with smaller networks at the beginning of their freshman year. Average effects of network size on college achievement are small, but a marginal increase in the size of same-race peer networks raises GPA by 0.1 point. We also find some suggestive evidence that minority students with large high school peer networks reap larger academic benefits than their white counterparts.

An extensive literature debates the causes and consequences of the desegregation of American schools in the twentieth century. Despite the social importance of desegregation and the magnitude of the literature, we have lacked a comprehensive accounting of the basic facts of school desegregation. This paper uses newly assembled data to document when and how Southern school districts desegregated, as well as the extent of court involvement in the desegregation process over the two full decades after Brown vs. Board of Education. We also examine heterogeneity in the path to desegregation by district characteristics. The results suggest that the existing quantitative literature, which generally either begins in 1968 and focuses on the role of federal courts in larger urban districts or relies on highly aggregated data, often tells an incomplete story of desegregation.

In two recent cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court examined whether race should be allowed to play an explicit role in the admission decisions of schools. The primary argument in these court cases and others has been that racial diversity strengthens the quality of education offered to all students. Underlying this argument is the notion that educational benefits arise if interactions between students of different races improve preparation for life after college by, among other things, fostering mutual understanding and correcting misperceptions. Then, a fundamental condition necessary for the primary legal argument to be compelling is that the types of students who choose to enter college actually have incorrect beliefs about individuals from different races at the time of college entrance. In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct evidence about this condition by taking advantage of unique new data that was collected specifically for this purpose.