Kelly Bedard

Unhealthy Assimilation: Why Do Immigrants Converge to American Health Status Levels?

It is well documented that immigrants are in better health upon arrival in the United States than their American counterparts but that this health advantage erodes over time. We study the potential determinants of this “healthy immigrant effect,” with a particular focus on the tendency of immigrants to converge to unhealthy American BMI levels. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, we find that average female and male immigrants enter the United States with BMIs that are approximately two and five percentage points lower than native-born women and men, respectively. Consistent with the declining health status of immigrants the longer they remain in the United States, we also find that female immigrants almost completely converge to American BMIs within 10 years of arrival, and men close a third of the gap within 15 years.

Human Capital versus Signaling Models: University Access and High School Dropouts

Under the educational sorting hypothesis, an environment in which some individuals are constrained from entering university will be characterized by increased pooling at the high school graduation level, as compared to an environment with greater university access. This results because some potential high school dropouts and university enrollees choose the high school graduate designation in order to take advantage of high‐ability individuals who are constrained from entering university. This is in stark contrast to human capital theory, which predicts higher university enrollment but identical high school dropout rates in regions with greater university access. I test the contradictory high school dropout predictions of the human capital and signaling models using NLSYM and NLSYW education data from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I find that labor markets that contain universities have higher high school dropout rates. This result is consistent with a signaling model and inconsistent with a pure human capital model.

The Long-Term Impact of Military Service on Health: Evidence from World War II and Korean War Veterans

During the World War II and Korean War era, the U.S. military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low-cost tobacco products on domestic military bases. In fact, even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco products on its bases. Using a variety of instrumental variables approaches to deal with nonrandom selection into the military and into smoking, we provide substantial evidence that cohorts with higher military participation rates subsequently suffered more premature mortality. More importantly, we show that a large fraction, 35 to 79 percent, of the excess veteran deaths due to heart disease and lung cancer are attributable to military-induced smoking.

Sex Preferences, Marital Dissolution, and the Economic Status of Women

The rise in the divorce rate over the past 40 years is one of the fundamental changes in American society. A substantial number of women and children now spend some fraction of their life in single female-headed households, leading many to be concerned about their economic circumstances. Estimating the cause-to-effect relationship between marital dissolution and female economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase marital instability also may affect the economic status and labor market outcomes of women. We propose an instrumental variables solution to this problem based on the sex of the firstborn child. This strategy exploits the fact that the sex of the firstborn child is random and the fact that marriages are less likely to continue following the birth of girls as opposed to boys. Our IV results cast doubt on the widely held view that divorce causes large declines in economic status for women. Once the negative selection into divorce is accounted for, our results show that, on average, ever-divorced women live in households with more income per person than never-divorced women.

Are Middle Schools More Effective?: The Impact of School Structure on Student Outcomes

While nearly half of all school districts have adopted middle schools, there is little quantitative evidence of the efficacy of this educational structure. We estimate the impact of moving from a junior high school system, where students stay in elementary school longer, to a middle school system for on-time high school completion. This is a particularly good outcome measure because middle school advocates argued that this new system would be especially helpful for lower achieving students. In contrast to the stated objective, we find that moving to a middle school system decreases on-time high school completion by approximately 1–3 percent.

The Racial Wage Gap: The Importance of Labor Force Attachment Differences across Black, Mexican, and White Men.

Labor market attachment differs significantly across young black, Mexican, and white men. Although it has long been agreed that potential experience is a poor proxy for actual experience for women, many view it as an acceptable approximation for men. Using the NLSY, this paper documents the substantial difference between potential and actual experience for both black and Mexican men. We show that the fraction of the black/ white and Mexican/white wage gaps that are explained by differences in potential experience are quite different from the fraction of the racial wage gaps that are explained by actual (real) experience differences.

Wage and test score dispersion: some international evidence

This paper includes fifty observations on wage distributions across eleven countries and two age cohorts defined by international mathematics tests given to thirteen-year-olds in 1962 and 1982. It is found that wage dispersion later in life is never greater than test score dispersion. In particular, Lorenz curves for a cohorts wages always lie above or on top of the cohorts test score Lorenz curve. Wage dispersion, as summarized by Gini coefficients, is significantly related to test score dispersion and union density in the country. A general fall in test score dispersion between 1962 and 1982 appears to be reflected in reduced wage dispersion. For three countries with available data (the U.S., the U. K., and Japan), evidence of skill-based changes in wage dispersion between the early 1970s and the late 1980s is found.

School Quality and the Distribution of Male Earnings in Canada.

Using quantile regressions, this paper provides evidence that the relationship between school inputs and wages varies across points in the conditional wage distribution and educational attainment levels. Although smaller classes generally have a positive return for individuals at high quantiles, they have either no impact or a negative impact at low quantiles. Similarly, while more highly paid teachers benefit dropouts at high quantiles and graduates at low quantiles, they have a negative return for all other quantile-education groups. The results presented in this paper also suggest that the optimal school for high school graduates is likely smaller than for high school dropouts.

THE RELATIVE EARNINGS OF YOUNG MEXICAN, BLACK, AND WHITE WOMEN

This analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth indicates that young Mexican women and young black women earned, respectively, 9.5% and 13.2% less than young white women in 1994. Differences in education appear to be the most important explanation for the Mexican-white wage gap, whereas differences in labor force attachment are the most important determinant of the black-white wage gap. The authors show that accounting for actual labor market experience, rather than simply imputing experience based on years since leaving school, is crucially important in such analyses.

THE WAGES OF FAILURE: NEW EVIDENCE ON SCHOOL RETENTION AND LONG-RUN OUTCOMES

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in early grade retention is associated with a 0.7 percent increase in mean male hourly wages. Further, the observed positive wage effect is not limited to the lower tail of the wage distribution but appears to persist throughout the distribution. Though there is an extensive literature attempting to estimate the effect of retention on the retained, this analysis offers what may be the first estimates of average long-run impacts of retention on all students.