According to the United States Department of Justice (2017), over 10,000 formerly incarcerated individuals are released each week from federal and state prisons. Approximately two-thirds of this population will be re-arrested within three years of release. Although employment has been found to reduce recidivism, the majority of formerly…

Financial software offers an appealing substitute for an investment in complex financial knowledge to help individuals make better financial decisions. Little is known, however, about which consumers use financial software and whether the use of financial software results in improved financial outcomes. Using data from the 2008 National…

Education is a key sociological variable in the explanation of health and health disparities. Conventional wisdom emphasizes a life course--human capital perspective with expectations of causal effects that are quasi-linear, large in magnitude for high levels of educational attainment, and reasonably robust in the face of measured and unmeasured…

College is increasingly essential for economic and social mobility. Current research and public policy devotes significant attention to race, income, and socioeconomic factors in college access. Yet, wealth's role, as differentiated from income, is largely unexplored. This paper examines the differences between wealth and income in the…

This study investigated the relation between building human capital of former dropouts and their occupational standing and the interaction effects with individual characteristics. By applying the growth curve model, this study highlighted the factors that lead high school dropouts to enhance their occupational standing. An increment in the work…

Learning disabled youth in the Child and Young Adult samples of the NLSY79 are "more" likely to graduate from high school than peers with the same measured cognitive ability, a difference that cannot be explained by differences in noncognitive skills, families, or school resources. Instead, I find that learning disabled students graduate…

Are economic resources related to relationship quality among young couples, and to what extent does this vary by relationship type? To answer these questions, we estimated regression models predicting respondent reports of conflict and affection in cohabiting and married partner relationships using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997…

While "ability" has long featured prominently in economic models and empirical studies of labor markets, economists have only recently begun to consider how personality and attitudes--noncognitive factors--influence behavior both from a theoretical and empirical standpoint. This dissertation incorporates noncognitive factors into…

Researchers often identify degree effects by including degree attainment ("D") and years of schooling ("S") in a wage model, yet the source of independent variation in these measures is not well understood. We argue that "S" is negatively correlated with ability among degree-holders because the most able graduate the…

Recent models of human capital formation represent a synthesis of the human capital approach and a life cycle view of human development that is grounded in neuroscience (Heckman 2007). This model of human development, the stability of the home and parental mental health can have notable impacts on skill development in children that may affect the…

In traditional signaling models, education provides a way for individuals to sort themselves by ability. Employers in turn use education to statistically discriminate, paying wages that reflect the average productivity of workers with the same given level of education. In this paper, we provide evidence that education (specifically, attending…

This paper examines the effect of teenagers' outlooks--specified as their locus of control--on educational attainment and labor market outcomes. I replicate the study of Coleman and DeLeire (2003) and test the predictions of their theoretical model using a different data set--National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). The findings fail to…

Analysis of data from a sample of women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth shows that adolescent fertility substantially reduces years of formal education and work experience. These reductions in human capital have a significant effect on wages at age 25. (SK)

Recent reports using cross-sectional data indicate an increase in the percentage of wives who outearn their husbands, yet we know little about the persistence of wives' income advantage. The present analyses utilize the 1990-1994 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N = 3,481) to examine wives' long-term earnings advantage.…

Adult students (25 years old and over) currently constitute 43% of all college students. This paper investigates the importance of college timing in determining earnings. Findings show that those who complete college at a later age receive a significantly smaller initial earning increase than those who acquire their education earlier in life.…