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State of the Union 2019: Racial and Gender Identities

  • Millennials are more likely than previous generations to identify as multiracial. 
  • Millennials also are more likely to adopt unconventional gender identities, such as reporting that they see themselves as equally feminine and masculine. 
  • However, they are not outpacing previous generations in rejecting race and gender stereotypes. Their attitudes toward women’s roles and perceptions of black Americans are quite similar to those of baby boomers or Gen Xers. 

State of the Union 2019: Employment

  • Labor force activity has declined for all prime-age workers, but the decline among young workers has been especially rapid. This means that millennials who are currently 25–34 years old are working less than Gen Xers at the same age.

    State of the Union 2019: Education

    • The payoff to a college degree—in terms of earnings and full-time work—is as high for millennials as it’s ever been.
    • But there is a substantial earnings gap between those who are and aren’t college educated. Millennials with no more than a high school diploma have much lower earnings in early adulthood than prior generations.

     

    State of the Union 2019: Criminal Justice

    • The recent reversal in overall incarceration rates takes the form of an especially prominent decline in rates of imprisonment for black millennial men in their late 20s. The decline is far less dramatic for other population groups—such as white and Hispanic men—that never experienced the extremely high rates that black men experienced.

      The Effects of Sexism on American Women: The Role of Norms vs. Discrimination

      We study how reported sexism in the population affects American women. Fixed-effects and TSLS estimates show that higher prevailing sexism where she was born (background sexism) and where she currently lives (residential sexism) both lower a woman's wages, labor force participation and ages of marriage and childbearing.

      Prenatal Exposure to an Acute Stressor and Children’s Cognitive Outcomes

      Exposure to environmental stressors is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic lines and may have enduring negative consequences, even when experienced before birth. Yet, estimating the consequences of prenatal stress on children’s outcomes is complicated by the issue of confounding (i.e., unobserved factors correlated with stress exposure and with children’s outcomes). I combine a natural experiment—a strong earthquake in Chile—with a panel survey to capture the effect of prenatal exposure on acute stress and children’s cognitive ability.

      Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share

      Many technological innovations replace workers with machines, but this capital-labor substitution need not reduce aggregate labor demand because it simultaneously induces four countervailing responses: own-industry output effects; cross-industry input–output effects; between-industry shifts; and final demand effects. We quantify these channels using four decades of harmonized cross-country and industry data, where we measure automation as industry-level movements in total factor productivity (TFP) that are common across countries.

      Incarceration Spillovers in Criminal and Family Networks

      Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be charged with a crime, respectively, over the ensuing four years. Correlational evidence misleadingly finds small positive effects.

      A Relational Inequality Approach to First- and Second-Generation Immigrant Earnings in German Workplaces

      We conceptualize immigrant incorporation as a categorically driven process and contrast the bright distinctions between first-generation immigrants and natives, with more blurry second-generation contrasts. We analyze linked employer-employee data of a sample of 5,097 employees in 97 large German organizations and focus on first- and second-generation immigrants. We explore how generational status in the labor market and workplace contexts expands and contracts native-immigrant wage inequalities.

      XX>XY?: The Changing Female Advantage in Life Expectancy

      Females live longer than males in most parts of the world today. Among OECD nations in recent years, the difference in life expectancy at birth is around four to six years (seven in Japan). But have women always lived so much longer than men? The answer is that they have not. We ask when and why the female advantage emerged. We show that reductions in maternal mortality and fertility are not the reasons. Rather, we argue that the sharp reduction in infectious disease in the early twentieth century played a role.

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