Spring 2013

Increasing Inequality in Parent Incomes and Children's Completed Schooling: Correlation or Causation?

ABSTRACT: It is well known that income inequality increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Reardon (2011) documents a correspondingly large increase - of close to .50 standard deviations - in the test score gap between children in low and high income families over the same period. This paper shifts the focus from achievement to attainment, as measured by years of completed schooling, and tracks changes in income inequality and educational attainment between children born into low- and high-income households in the U.S. between 1954 and 1985.

Inequality: Cooperation, Kinship and Witchcraft in Mpimbwe, Tanzania

ABSTRACT: While the causes, transmission and consequences of material and social inequality are well studied in the social sciences, the ways in which people respond to inequality are less clear. As evolutionary social scientists we know that humans show a strong aversion to inequality, but we have little understanding of how individuals respond behaviourally to disparities in material, social and relational wealth.

Trade in Migrant Labor: Inter-Organizational Ties and Employer Recruitment During an Economic Downturn

ABSTRACT: To explain the pattern of labor migration to western nations research has examined supply side factors of migrant characteristics, their familial networks, and wage differentials of sending countries, these studies of immigration focus on periods of economic growth. However, my multi-site ethnography consisting of 97 interviews with U.S. guest workers, oil industry employers, and Indian labor brokers reveals that employer sponsored labor migration to the United States continues during the economic downturn.