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Estimates imply that only one-third of elderly persons who are eligible for food stamps actually participate in the program, which is half the rate that exists among younger people. This study investigates potential reasons for the relatively low take-up rate among the elderly. Analyzing new data, we conclude that the low take-up rate is not explained by measurement error and little is explained by various behavioral factors. Despite this much lower take-up rate, elderly who are eligible for assistance but not enrolled in the program do not appear to be especially needy.

Using 1970, 1980, and 1990 U.S. census data, the author examines the life-cycle patterns of immigrant women's labor force participation. He finds that the cross-sectional approach that has been used in all previous studies leads to a substantial over-estimate of the degree to which immigrant women's assimilation increases their labor force participation. The effect of assimilation found by using the cohort approach, however (which acknowledges the possibility that patterns of labor force participation partly reflect the year of immigration), is still sizable. The effect is concentrated within the first 10 years after arrival. There are substantial differences in participation and assimilation by country of birth. Immigrants from Japan, Korea, and China are found to have experienced the greatest degree of assimilation, with an effect that raises the probability of working by 20 percentage points during the first 10 years after arriving in the United States.

Forty-two percent of immigrant workers in the United States are women, yet almost all of the evidence on the economic performance of immigrants is based on analyses of men. This study begins to fill the void by examining differences in a wide array of labor market outcomes between U.S.-born and immigrant women, and among immigrant women born in different countries or regions of the world, using the 1970, 1980 and 1990 censuses. Immigrant women were less likely to participate in the labor force, and this gap increased to 7 percentage points by 1990. However, the share of self-employed and the number of weeks and hours worked among employed women were roughly the same for immigrants and natives throughout the 1970–1990 period. The gap in unemployment and weekly wages widened in favor of natives between 1970 and 1990, with a gap in median wages of 14 percent in 1990. However, immigrants born in the United Kingdom and Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, and the Middle East have had steady or improved wages and unemployment relative to U.S.-born women. At the same time, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who now represent one-quarter of all immigrant women, have experienced relatively high unemployment and low earnings, and these differences have increased, with the wage gap reaching 35 percent in 1990. Disparities in completed years of schooling can explain a substantial share of the differences in labor market outcomes.

This study examines the economic progress of foreign-born men in the United States. Europeans entered the United States with relatively high wages and earned wages comparable to natives over their life course. Japanese Korean and Chinese men entered with lower wages but quickly caught up with U.S.-born workers. Mexicans and Central Americans entered with low wages and the wage gap between themselves and U.S.-born workers has not shrunk. Disparities in completed years of education and whether education was received in the United States can explain a large share of the differences in the level of wages. For immigrants from some countries it is found that more highly educated men assimilate more quickly. The rate of economic progress has not improved for more recent arrivals from any country but this is most problematic among Mexicans and Central Americans because of their relatively low rates of wage growth. (EXCERPT)

Recent work by a number of economists has opened a debate about the role played by intergenerational transfers. Using the new Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we are better able to address the issues involved. Contrary to the current literature on bequests, we do not find that parents give transfers equally to all children. Rather, we find that in the case of inter-vivos transfers, respondents give greaterfinancial assistance to their less well off children than to their children with higher incomes. Financial transfers to elderly parents are also found to be negatively related to the (potential) recipient's income. These results hold both for the incidence of transfers and for the amounts. In addition, we allow for unobserved differences across families by estimating fixed effect models and find our results to be robust to these specifications. A comparison of the HRS transfer data to other survey data demonstrates that the HRS is potentially quite useful for research on transfer behavior.

We use comparable surveys from Brazil and the United States to examine "vertical" and "horizontal" connections between families. Motivated by a model of assortative mating and intergenerational transmission of schooling and earnings, we include the schooling of relatives in male wage equations. We find that the effect offather-in-law's schooling is larger than the effect offather's schooling in Brazil, while the opposite is observed in the United States. We interpret these effects as indicators of unobservable worker characteristics, with differences in assortative mating and female labor market activity explaining the differences in the apparent effect of fathers and fathers-in-law in the two countries.