Investments in education, particularly in girls’ education, can play an important role in promoting demographic changes conducive to slower population growth. Increased education raises the mean length of generation, that is, the amount of time a cohort of women takes to reproduce itself. Increased education is also associated with better utilization of public health and family planning service...

Social mobility is central to immigrant integration. Since first-generation immigrants in Europe and North America typically experience downward mobility when they migrate, they are over-represented in low-skilled or low-earning jobs, in many cases despite high levels of education. With upward social mobility, however, immigrants can break out of their position at the bottom of the labor market...

I illustrate the variety of approaches to development issues microeconomists employ, focusing on studies that illuminate and quantify the major mechanisms posited by growth theorists who highlight the role of education in fostering growth. I begin with a basic issue: what are the returns to schooling? I discuss microeconomic studies that estimate schooling returns using alternative approaches t...

Charles et al. / CONTEXT F WOMEN’S MARKET CAREERS The authors compare determinants of labor force participation and occupational sex typing over a 20-year period for matched samples of American and Swiss women. Results indicate important cross-national differences in processes governing women’s market careers. These are in line with the authors’ predictions regarding mediating effects of specif...

Intermarriage between a native and immigrant can affect the household’s supply of labor hours. Spouse selectivity on the basis of human capital, distribution of bargaining power, and labor supply coordination within the household can differ by type of marriage and gender of the immigrant—and, consequently, affect how spouses supply labor to the market. Using the 2010 American Community Survey, ...

We use nine waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to investigate the large labor market height premium observed in the BHPS, where each inch of height is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in wages, for both men and women. We find that half of the premium can be explained by the association between height and educational attainment among BHPS participants. Of the remaining prem...

We use information on second-generation migrants to study the existence of a cultural component on the formation process of noncognitive skills and its effect on education and employment outcomes. Our measures of noncognitive skills include: personality traits that children are encouraged to learn and civic capital. Individuals whose cultural heritage places a lower value on child qualities pos...

While men have always received more education than women in the past, this gender imbalance in education has turned around in large parts of the world. In many countries, women now excel men in terms of participation and success in higher education. This implies that, for the first time in history, there are more highly educated women than men reaching the reproductive ages and looking for a pa...