Disparities In Economic Outcomes Research Articles

Family socioeconomic status and college attendance: A consideration of individual-level and school-level pathways.

Inequality research has found that a college education can ameliorate intergenerational disparities in economic outcomes. Much attention has focused on how family resources impact academic achievement, though research continues to identify how mechanisms related to social class and structural contexts drive college attendance patterns. Using the Education Longitudinal Study and multilevel modeling techniques, this study uniquely highlights how extracurricular activities relate to family socioeconomic status and school contexts to influence college attendance. Altogether, sport and non-sport extracurricular participation, college expectations, and academic achievement scores, situated within unique school contexts that are driven by residential social class segregation, contribute to the cumulative advantages of children from higher SES families. The results from this study show that these cumulative advantages are positively associated with college attendance and an increased likelihood of attending a more selective school.

Introduction to the Special Edition of the Review of Black Political Economy on Revisiting the Kerner Commission Report

Revisiting the work of the Kerner Commission after 50 years offers the opportunity to explore two unresolved research and policy issues. First, many of the racial disparities that promoted widespread disorder and violent protests in 1967-1968 remain today. Second, there is the embarrassment of not having any African American researchers on the technical staff examining the causes and consequences of racial disparities in economic outcomes. This special edition of the Review of Black Political Economy ( RBPE), with generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, explores these two themes.

Unequal Opportunity? Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in the Returns to Internal U.S. Migration.

Internal U.S. migration plays an important role in increasing individuals' access to economic and social opportunities. At the same time, race, ethnicity, and gender have frequently shaped the opportunities and obstacles individuals face. It is therefore likely that the returns to internal migration are also shaped by race, ethnicity, and gender, though we have relatively little knowledge of whether this is the case for contemporary internal U.S. migration. To explore this possibility, I use restricted, geocoded National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data from 1979 to 2012. I find that white men gain the most economically from migrating, relative to black and Latino men. For women, migration is associated with stable or narrower racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes, with Latina women experiencing the largest economic benefits associated with migration and with black and white women exhibiting comparable economic returns to migration. Together, these findings indicate that migration may maintain or even narrow racial/ethnic disparities in economic outcomes among women, but widen them among men.

Human capital sorting: The “when” and “who” of the sorting of educated workers to urban regions

AbstractThe sorting of high‐ability workers is often advanced as one source of spatial disparities in economic outcomes. There are still few papers that analyze when human capital sorting occurs and whom it involves. Using data on 16 cohorts of university graduates in Sweden, we demonstrate significant sorting to urban regions on high school grades and education levels of parents, i.e., two attributes typically associated with latent abilities that are valued in the labor market. A large part of this sorting has already occurred in deciding where to study, because the top universities in Sweden are predominantly located in urban regions. The largest part of directed sorting on ability indicators occurs in the decision of where to study. Even after controlling for sorting prior to labor market entry, the “best and brightest” are still more likely to start working in urban regions. However, this effect appears to be driven by Sweden's main metropolitan region, Stockholm. We find no influence of our ability indicators on the probability of starting to work in urban regions after graduation when Stockholm is excluded. Studies of human capital sorting need to account for selection processes to and from universities, because neglecting mobility prior to labor market entry is likely to lead to an underestimation of the extent of the sorting to urban regions.