Papers Containing Tag(s): 'General Social Survey'
The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
See Working Papers by Tag(s), Keywords(s), Author(s), or Search Text
Click here to search again
Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search
Authors
No authors occur more than twice in this search.
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 11
-
Working PaperMilitary Service and Immigrants' Integration: Evidence From the Vietnam Draft Lotteries
June 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-35
Seminal theories in political science argue that military service is a critical driver of minority integration. However, a major obstacle bedeviling the study of military service is self-selection: individuals who are better integrated may be more likely to join the military in the first place. We address the selection problem by examining the effects of military conscription during the Vietnam War using an instrumental variables approach. Conscription during 1970--72 was decided on the basis of national draft lotteries that assigned draft numbers based on an individual's date of birth. Using the draft lottery instrument, we find no evidence of a causal effect of military service on a range of integration outcomes from the 2000 decennial census. At least for the Vietnam era, the link between service and long-term integration is largely driven by self-selection, which points to important scope conditions for the integrationist view.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperConnected and Uncooperative: The Effects of Homogenous and Exclusive Social Networks on Survey Response Rates and Nonresponse Bias
January 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-01
Social capital, the strength of people's friendship networks and community ties, has been hypothesized as an important determinant of survey participation. Investigating this hypothesis has been difficult given data constraints. In this paper, we provide insights by investigating how response rates and nonresponse bias in the American Community Survey are correlated with county-level social network data from Facebook. We find that areas of the United States where people have more exclusive and homogenous social networks have higher nonresponse bias and lower response rates. These results provide further evidence that the effects of social capital may not be simply a matter of whether people are socially isolated or not, but also what types of social connections people have and the sociodemographic heterogeneity of their social networks.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWhen and Why Does Nonresponse Occur? Comparing the Determinants of Initial Unit Nonresponse and Panel Attrition
September 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-44
Though unit nonresponse threatens data quality in both cross-sectional and panel surveys, little is understood about how initial nonresponse and later panel attrition may be theoretically or empirically distinct phenomena. This study advances current knowledge of the determinants of both unit nonresponse and panel attrition within the context of the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panel survey, which I link with high-quality federal administrative records, paradata, and geographic data. By exploiting the SIPP's interpenetrated sampling design and relying on cross-classified random effects modeling, this study quantifies the relative effects of sample household, interviewer, and place characteristics on baseline nonresponse and later attrition, addressing a critical gap in the literature. Given the reliance on successful record linkages between survey sample households and federal administrative data in the nonresponse research, this study also undertakes an explicitly spatial analysis of the place-based characteristics associated with successful record linkages in the U.S.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Transformation of Self Employment
February 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-03
Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period also witnessed declines in 'hometown' local entrepreneurship and the probability of the self-employed being among top earners. Using 2016 data, we show that high startup capital requirements are linked with lower profitability at small scales. The transition away from high startup capital industries appears most closely linked to changes in small business production functions and less due to advantageous reallocation to other opportunities, growth in returns-to-scale among large businesses, or a worsening of financing conditions and debt levels.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperLeapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility Across the 20th Century
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-20
During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have 'leapfrogged' or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 Census, years 1973, 1979, 1981-90 of the Current Population Survey, the 2000 Census, and years 2001-2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation, but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for 20th century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe effect of child support on selection into marriage and fertility
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-04
Child support policies in the United States have expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s and now cover 1 in 5 children. This paper studies the consequences of child support for marriage and fertility decisions. I first introduce a model showing that child support enforces ex ante commitment from men to provide financial support in the event of a child, which (1) increases premarital sex among couples unlikely to marry, and (2) reduces the abortion rate, by lessening the cost of raising a child as a single mom. Using variation in the timing and geography of the rollout of U.S. child support laws relative to the timing of pregnancy, from 1977 to 1992, I find that marriages following an unplanned pregnancy are less likely to occur under strengthened child support laws, accounting for about a 7-8 percentage point reduction relative to a base of 38 percent. I find that the child support rollout reduced the abortion rate by 1-2 per 1000 women aged 15-44, off a base of 28, representing about 50 percent of the total decline in the abortion rate over this period.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperRACE-SPECIFIC AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES: SOCIAL DISTANCE AND THE BLACK-WHITE WAGE GAP
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-24
We demonstrate a striking but previously unnoticed relationship between city size and the black-white wage gap, with the gap increasing by 2.5% for every million-person increase in urban population. We then look within cities and document that wages of blacks rise less with agglomeration in the workplace location, measured as employment density per square kilometer, than do white wages. This pattern holds even though our method allows for non-parametric controls for the effects of age, education, and other demographics on wages, for unobserved worker skill as proxied by residential location, and for the return to agglomeration to vary across those demographics, industry, occupation and metropolitan areas. We find that an individual's wage return to employment density rises with the share of workers in their work location who are of their own race. We observe similar patterns for human capital externalities as measured by share workers with a college education. We also find parallel results for firm productivity by employment density and share college-educated using firm racial composition in a sample of manufacturing firms. These findings are consistent with the possibility that blacks, and black- majority firms, receive lower returns to agglomeration because such returns operate within race, and blacks have fewer same-race peers and fewer highly-educated same-race peers at work from whom to enjoy spillovers than do whites. Data on self-reported social networks in the General Social Survey provide further evidence consistent with this mechanism, showing that blacks feel less close to whites than do whites, even when they work exclusively with whites. We conclude that social distance between blacks and whites preventing shared benefits from agglomeration isa significant contributor to overall black-white wage disparities.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCheaper by the Dozen: Using Sibling Discounts at Catholic Schools to Estimate the Price Elasticity of Private School Attendance
October 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-34
The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. Estimating this elasticity is empirically challenging because prices and quantities are jointly determined in the market for private schooling. We exploit a unique and previously undocumented source of variation in private school tuition to estimate this key parameter. A majority of Catholic elementary schools offer discounts to families that enroll more than one child in the school in a given year. Catholic school tuition costs therefore depend upon the interaction of the number and spacing of a family's children with the pricing policies of the local school. This within-neighborhood variation in tuition prices allows us to control for unobserved determinants of demand with a fine set of geographic fixed effects, while still identifying the price parameter. We use data from 3700 Catholic schools, matched to restricted Census data that identifies geography at the block level. We find that a standard deviation decrease in tuition prices increases the probability that a family will send its children to private school by one-half percentage point, which translates into an elasticity of Catholic school attendance with respect to tuition costs of -0.19. Our subgroup results suggest that a voucher program would disproportionately induce into private schools those who, along observable dimensions, are unlike those who currently attend private school.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEmployee Capitalism or Corporate Socialism? Broad-Based Employee Stock Ownership
December 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-44
How employee share ownership plans (ESOPs) affect employee compensation and shareholder value depends on the size. Small ESOPs, defined as those controlling less than 5% of outstanding shares, benefit both workers and shareholders, implying positive productivity gains. However, the effects of large ESOPs on worker compensation and shareholder value are more or less neutral, suggesting little productivity gains. These differential effects appear to be due to two non-value-creating motives specific to large ESOPS: (1) To form management-worker alliances ala Pagano and Volpin (2005), wherein management bribes workers to garner worker support in thwarting hostile takeover threats and (2) To substitute wages with ESOP shares by cash constrained firms. Worker compensation increases when firms under takeover threats adopt large ESOPs, but only if the firm operates in a non-competitive industry. The effects on firm valuation also depend on the strength of product market competition: When the competition is strong (weak), most of the productivity gains accrue to employees (shareholders). Competitive industry also implies greater job mobility within the industry, enabling workers to take a greater portion of productivity gains.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperPlace of Work and Place of Residence: Informal Hiring Networks and Labor Market Outcomes
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-23
We use a novel dataset and research design to empirically detect the effect of social interactions among neighbors on labor market outcomes. Specifically, using Census data that characterize residential and employment locations down to the city block, we examine whether individuals residing in the same block are more likely to work together than those in nearby blocks. We find evidence of significant social interactions operating at the block level: residing on the same versus nearby blocks increases the probability of working together by over 33 percent. The results also indicate that this referral effect is stronger when individuals are similar in sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., both have children of similar ages) and when at least one individual is well attached to the labor market. These findings are robust across various specifications intended to address concerns related to sorting and reverse causation. Further, having determined the characteristics of a pair of individuals that lead to an especially strong referral effect, we provide evidence that the increased availability of neighborhood referrals has a significant impact on a wide range of labor market outcomes including employment and wages.View Full Paper PDF
