We study the effect of a compulsory education reform in Sweden on adult health and mortality. The reform was implemented by municipalities between 1949 and 1962 as a social experiment and implied an extension of compulsory schooling from 7 or 8 years depending on municipality to 9 years nationally. We use detailed individual data on education,…

Low high school graduation rates and sharply declining employment rates among disadvantaged youth have led to increasing numbers of youth who are disconnected from both school and work. What programs and policies might prevent these disconnections and improve educational and employment outcomes, particularly among young men? We review the evidence…

After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

Latino male students are "vanishing" from the American education pipeline, a trend that is especially evident at the secondary and postsecondary levels. The question of why Latino males are vanishing from America's colleges is complex, and this scholarly article explores some of the socio-cultural factors, peer dynamics, and labor force demands…

Gordon Berlin discusses the nation's long struggle to reduce poverty in families with children, and proposes a counterintuitive solution--rewarding the work of individuals. He notes that policymakers' difficulty in reducing family poverty since 1973 is attributable to two intertwined problems--falling wages among low-skilled workers and the…

The 1970s were marked by an increase in the level of education attainment of the average worker. By 1979 thirty-six per cent of all workers over 18 completed at least one year of college, and the percentage of workers not completing high school declined considerably. While the proportion of men participating in the labor force continued to fall,…

This paper examines trends in the employment rates of young black men, and other groups of young people, during 1979-2000. Data from the Current Population Survey's Outgoing Rotation Groups are used to estimate these trends and their determinants. The data are pooled and analyzed for differences across individuals and metropolitan areas and for…

In the 1980s, men's average earnings declined and percentage with low earnings increased, largely because of technological change. Shifts in industrial employment patterns affected African Americans' earnings more than whites' or Hispanics', although educational upgrading helped hold down the growth of low earnings. (SK)

This paper studies the determinants of age-specific employment rates among Swedish males, focusing on the effect of education on employment. We use cohort specific data for the time period 1984-1996 covering male cohorts aged 21-45. It is found that aggregate age-group-specific employment rates increase with the proportion of the cohort with an…

Results of study of United States academic librarians listed in "Who's Who in Library and Information Services" indicate that: men had greater chance of being deemed successful; one-third of academic entries had advanced degrees in addition to M.L.S.; successful academic librarians tended to work in Association of Research Libraries institutions.…

This paper from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides information on current status and historical trends in the employment of Hispanic women. Some of the findings include the following: (1) the Hispanic women's population increased by 52 percent from 1990-1999, compared with 17 percent for black women and 7 percent for white women; (2) 9…

This document consists of four separately-published fact sheets providing information, derived from U.S. government sources, about the condition of Hispanics in the United States. The first, "Hispanic Children, Poverty, and Federal Assistance Programs," describes the status of Hispanic American children and the federal programs designed…

When chronicling how less-skilled workers have fared in the U.S. since the late 1970's, existing literature often cites their falling wages and declining participation in the labor force. Most research describing these trends, however, focuses primarily on men, failing to account for the fact that less-skilled women's real wages have not fallen,…

A major benefit of education is the lower risk of unemployment at higher educational levels. Analysis of statistical data on the white male labor force drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicates that the reduction of the incidence of unemployment is far more important than the reduced duration of unemployment in creating…

This paper measures the relationship between employment growth and employment opportunities for noncollege-educated males, examining variations across metropolitan areas in the living-wage employment ratio for prime-aged males with at most a high school education (less educated). Living-wage employment is full-time, year-round employment yielding…