Kathryn Wilson

The Determinants of Educational Attainment: Modeling and Estimating the Human Capital Model and Education Production Functions

This paper develops and estimates a theoretical model of an individual’s high school graduation choice. The model incorporates the idea of a utility-maximizing youth responding to the economic incentives associated with incremental education, as posited by the human capital literature. However, it also allows for family, neighborhood, and school characteristics to affect the process of being educated, as posited by the education production function literature. Estimation of the model, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) supplemented with neighborhood and school data, indicates that indeed students respond to economic incentives in making education choices; however, most of the effects of background characteristics are working through the education process rather than affecting returns to schooling.

The role of economic incentives in teenage nonmarital childbearing choices

A method of manufacturing a light conducting element of synthetic resin in which a continuous change takes place in refractive index from the surface of the element toward its interior, which comprises bringing a transparent solid article of a network polymer which is in the incompletely polymerized state and contains 2 to 80% of a solvent-soluble component, into contact at its surface with a monomer capable of forming a polymer having a different refractive index from the network polymer thereby to cause the diffusion and migration of the monomer into the interior of the article through the contact surface, thereby setting up a gradient in the concentration of the monomer component in the interior of the above article which gradually decreases from the contact surface toward the interior, and simultaneously with, or after, this diffusion step, polymerizing the monomer in the interior of the article and completing the polymerization of the network polymer of the article. The article may be in the form of a fiber, rod, sheet or hollow cylinder.

Intergenerational health disparities : Socioeconomic status, women's health conditions, and child behavior problems

Objective. Relatively little is known about the intergenerational mechanisms that lead to social disparities in child health. We examined whether the association between low socioeconomic status (SES) and child behavior problems is mediated by maternal health conditions and behavior. Methods. Prospective cohort data (1979–1998) on 2,677 children and their mothers were obtained from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. SES, the Child Behavior Problems Index (BPI), and maternal smoking, depressive symptoms, and alcohol use before, during, and after pregnancy were examined. Results. Lower income and lower maternal education were associated with increased child BPI scores. Adjustment for maternal smoking, depressive symptoms, and alcohol use attenuated the associations between SES and child BPI by 26% to 49%. These maternal health conditions often occurred together, persisted over time, and were associated with the mothers own childhood SES and pre-pregnancy health. Conclusions. Social disparities in womens health conditions may help shape the likelihood of behavior problems in the subsequent generation. Improved public health programs and services for disadvantaged women across the lifecourse may not only address their own urgent health needs, but reduce social disparities in the health and well-being of their children.

Intergenerational Mobility in the United States and Great Britain: A Comparative Study of Parent–Child Pathways

We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the childs characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence.

Engaging New Faculty in the Scholarship of Teaching.

This article describes how scholarly teaching projects were conceived, implemented, and evaluated by junior faculty from a variety of disciplines at a medium-sized midwestern university. The authors explore: considerations in designing scholarly teaching projects, methods used to evaluate teaching effectiveness, and outcomes of the teaching projects. Finally, two of the teaching projects illustrate how junior faculty with diverse courses, class sizes, and teaching concerns approached the task of improving their teaching.

Using the Psid to Study the Effects of School Spending

Many studies have examined the effects of school spending on educational attainment, and the results have been mixed. Unfortunately, most of these studies have had limited information about the family and neighborhood characteristics that may affect a students educational attainment. This articles uses a unique data set that adds school-level data from the Common Core of Data to the rich source of family and neighborhood information of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. It is found that school spending is positively related to the likelihood a student will graduate from high school and attend college and to the students years of schooling. In addition, the results for high school graduation are sensitive to the inclusion of variables often not available in previous studies, suggesting that omitted-variables bias may result in studies concluding that money does not matter when, indeed, school spending is important.

The changing economic status of disabled women, 1982–1991 Trends and their determinants

In this paper, we provide an assessment of the intertemporal economic well-being of a representative sample of females who became new Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries in 1982. We compare their economic circumstances over the 1982 to 1991 period with those of both disabled men who became new SSDI beneficiaries in 1982, and a matched sample of nondisabled females who had sufficient work experience for benefit eligibility should they have become disabled. In 1982, the new SSDI women beneficiaries were a relatively poor segment of U.S. society. One quarter of them lived in poverty, and 48 percent had incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Over the subsequent decade, some of those married in 1982 lost husbands and the income contributed by their husbands. Yet, as of 1991, over one half of these disabled women lived in families with income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Social Security benefits to disabled women have played an important, and growing, role in sustaining economic status. Nevertheless, the level of well-being of these women lies substantially below that of the comparison groups, and for some groups of the women, well-being trends were negative both absolutely and relative to the comparison groups. We statistically relate the poverty status of these new female recipients to sociodemographic factors that would be expected to contribute to low well-being, and simulate the effect of Social Security benefits in reducing poverty and replacing earnings. We suggest a number of SSDI-related policy changes that could, at low cost, reduce poverty among those women with the highest incidence rates.

School Finance, Equivalent Educational Expenditure and Income Distribution: Equal Dollars or Equal Chances for Success?

This article breaks new ground in the debate on school finance and equality of per pupil school expenditures. We are able to merge school district data with the individual and family data of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). This allows us to examine both student and school district characteristics and to assess several measures of equality of expenditure across the income distribution of parents and by funding sources. Unlike studies that use district-level data, our study finds a surprising degree of equality in the actual amounts expended per child in low- versus high-income families. But after adjusting expenditures for student body composition to reach equivalent education expenditures, we find a greater inequality in per pupil spending across the income distribution. In addition, there are substantial racial inequalities in expenditures across the income spectrum. In closing we discuss policy implications for school finance and increased equality of educational opportunity.

The effects of school quality on income

Abstract This paper uses a unique data set created by merging the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with school data from the Common Core of Data to examine the relationship between school expenditures and earnings. I find that school expenditures are related to earnings, and also positively affect the returns to schooling. This is particularly important given recent papers that have found no effect because this study is able to observe wages at later ages and is estimated for males and females. Robustness estimates find that if the sample were only observed at young ages, or estimated for white males, as has been done previously, the results would not hold. Therefore, it appears that even using an individual-level data set with students educated in this half of the century, school spending affects earnings.

The Changing Economic Status of U.S. Disabled Men: Trends and Their Determinants, 1982-1991

We track the level of economic well-being of the population of men who began receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits in 1980-81 from the time just after they became beneficiaries (in 1982) to 1991. We present measures of the economic well-being of disabled individuals and their nondisabled peers as indicators of the relative economic position of these two groups. These measures also provide an intertemporal comparison of wellbeing and hardship as disabled persons and their nondisabled peers age and retire. We first show several economic well-being indicators for new male recipients of disability benefits in 1982 and 1991. We then compare their economic position to that of a matched group of nondisabled males with sufficient work histories to have been disability-insured. Because labor market changes over this decade have led to a relative deterioration in the position of younger and less-educated workers, we compare men with disabilities to those without disabilities and distinguish different age and educational levels within the groups. We conclude by assessing the antipoverty effectiveness of Social Security income support for both younger and older male SSDI recipients.