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People who move to support the employment prospects of their spouse are tied migrants. This geographical disruption directly affects the career trajectories of tied migrants. Military spouses are an ideal case for studying how tied migration affects employment because they experience tied migration repeatedly: active duty military personnel move about once every two years, twice as often as civilian families. Military spouses experience worse employment outcomes than their civilian peers, but little empirical research explicitly tries to adjudicate the mechanisms generating such outcomes. We develop and test a theory of anticipatory discrimination by explicitly evaluating how past geographic mobility and future expectations of geographic stability influence evaluations of women job seekers. We use three complementary experimental methods: a vignette experiment, a field audit study, and a replication of the audit study with members of the general public, to assess how past and future expectations of mobility lead to differential evaluations of women job seekers. This study informs how employers penalize a group of workers for being mobile, non-linear, or exhibiting other dimensions of "nonstandard" work, yet that is precisely the direction the economy is ostensibly headed. Most importantly, in developing the theory of anticipatory discrimination, this study has the potential to inform a broader class of differential treatment in hiring and other processes, namely discrimination on the basis of potential future behavior or statuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyone who returns home from war will eventually become a veteran and most will face the challenge of finding a civilian job or pursuing higher education. This study examines veterans' accounts of how they imagine and implement the process of returning to civilian life after serving in the U.S military. Building upon recent sociological research that seeks to clarify how beliefs impact behavior, we investigate how beliefs evolve and inform the numerous decisions involved in planning and enacting the return to civilian life. We conducted semi-structured, longitudinal interviews (pre-separation and post-separation) with 48 transitioning servicemembers to collect their accounts of: how and why they decided to leave, what they plan to do as civilians, and how they implement their plans for life after service. In this working paper, we focus on the factors that shape variation in the early planning and implementation processes, prior to veterans leaving active duty. Findings reveal variation in two primary facets of planning the return to civilian life: (1) the timing of articulating post-service goals and constructing a corresponding plan, and (2) maintaining coherence between plans and goals. We identify three planner types that represent these variations in the pre-separation transition: the detailed planner, the vague planner, and the wanderer. As we incorporate our follow-up interview data in the coming months, we will expand findings on respondents' accounts of accomplishing (or not) their first post-military goal, while considering how planner type, social background, and expectations contribute to variation in goal accomplishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates changes in the association between military service and socioeconomic attainment across age, period, and cohort. It draws on previous theories regarding the role of military service in providing a turning point or contributing to cumulative advantage, as well as observations about how institutions have changed over time. It uses three decades of data from the Current Population Survey, which allow us to compare the experiences of veterans who served in the military in four different wartime eras (World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). In these preliminary analyses we find changes in the relative fate of veterans across all temporal dimensions. We find that veterans on average have earned more than non-veterans, but that this premium has declined over time. In part, these period effects are associated with age and cohort differences. Veterans in previous cohorts had higher average earnings than non-veterans, for example, with the exception of those who were eligible to serve during the Vietnam era. Yet, veterans have the same average earnings in the beginning and end of the work life, but lower earnings than non-veterans at middle age. In the version to be presented at ASA, we plan to extend our theorizing to account for these complicated effects, and provide long-term historical comparisons not just of earnings, but also of labor force participation and unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although support for military personnel appears high, it remains unclear whether pride in military personnel and gratitude for their service translates to support for their wellbeing after service ends, and they become veterans. Furthermore, no research to date has investigated whether the actual level of support for veterans' benefits may be overstated due to a societal injunction to "support the troops". In this paper we employ a list experiment, a technique that allows investigators to identify the extent of socially desirable reporting on topics, and introduce some recent innovations in the analysis of such data that allow for true multivariate modeling. In doing so, we are able to reveal both the "true" extent of social support for recent military veterans' healthcare and for their inclusion in social life, as well as for the extent to which some groups overstate their support for veterans. To briefly anticipate our results, we find that while the public appears to offer overwhelming support for social engagement with, and spending on healthcare for recent veterans, there is substantial over-reporting of this support. There are important differences in levels of "true" support by age, race, media exposure, and political ideology, and variation in the extent of socially desirable reporting by a host of demographic and other factors. True support is differentially felt, as is the extent to which people overstate their true support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research finds that minority populations in the United States secure unionized employed as part of the process of economic incorporation. Yet little work has systematically tested whether this pattern holds for the nation's largest minority, Hispanics, during recent decades of labor decline. After juxtaposing traditional labor market position theories of unionization with solidaristic accounts, we utilize 1973-2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) data to provide the most comprehensive analysis of Hispanics and organized labor in the United States to date. We disaggregate the Hispanic population by immigrant status, nationality, and time since arrival to target subpopulation differences in unionization propensities. Some of our analyses take advantage of the CPS structure to target individuals who gain union status, allowing us to test whether the much-publicized efforts by organized labor to incorporate recent immigrants have resulted in detectable gains. Results suggest that certain Hispanic subpopulations - especially those born in the U.S. and immigrants who have secured citizenship - have higher unionization odds and join unions at higher rates than U.S.-born whites even after controlling for traditional positional accounts of labor organization. However, the large substantive effects of positional variables, such as sector, occupation, and firm size, indicate that organized labor's revival depends on more than any particular group's capacity for collective action. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does military service help or harm an individual's civilian employment opportunities? Further, is this different whether one is black, white or Hispanic? The purpose of this research is to assess the treatment of men who are recent military veterans in two large urban labor markets. In this project I fax matched pairs or sets of resumes to advertised entry-level positions in each of the two labor markets. Interest focuses on whether employers (the subjects) call back white, black, Hispanic and Arab-descent applicants at the same rate, and whether they call back veterans and non-veterans at the same rate. The research design allows for a direct assessment of whether employers exhibit discriminatory or preferential hiring treatment of veterans, and whether this differs by race/ethnic background and labor market locale. The experimental design used in the current research is a substantial improvement over statistical approaches used in earlier research by isolating the effects of the treatment condition (race or veteran status) rather than confounding it with other characteristics related to employment. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raise the question of how recent veterans of the military are being treated by employers. Because of the discriminatory treatment of many Vietnam veterans after their return from duty, it is important to make early assessments of how recent veterans of an all-volunteer force are being treated upon their return to the civilian workforce, after serving in wartime. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the factors associated with voluntary enlistment in the military at a time when fewer and fewer youth have significant contact with the institution of the military. This paper extends previous work on enlistment decision making in two ways. Using data from a recent cohort of high school graduates from the state of Texas, we can better understand the correlates of military enlistment in a time when enlistees have a real expectation of combat. More importantly, this analysis incorporates the concept of the ?institutional presence? of the military into the study of voluntary enlistment among youth. The institutional presence of the military measures the likelihood of social contact with the institution, and is hypothesized to affect the decision to enlist, such that the higher the institutional presence of the military, the more likely an individual is to enlist. Results from a multilevel multinomial logistic regression model confirm the hypothesis that a higher military institutional presence increases the odds of enlisting in the military relative to enrolling in college, becoming employed, or doing some other activity after high school. These findings suggest that future research should incorporate the concept of institutional presence into analyses of military enlistment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we address two primary questions: why have African-American private sector unionization rates surpassed those of white workers for decades, and how has private sector union decline exacerbated black-white wage inequality? Using various series of the Current Population Survey from 1973 to 2007, we first test competing theories of African-Americans' disproportionate presence in private sector unions. Results indicate that African-Americans' overrepresentation in private sector unions stems from more than their labor market position, supporting a protectionist theory of organized labor. We next investigate how unions pattern wages for black and white workers by measuring cross-sectional and longitudinal union wage effects, allowing for the effect of unions to vary by race. Among women, African-Americans' disproportionate concentration in organized labor and rapid deunionization contributes substantially to racial economic disparities: analyses reveal that in the absence of union decline, black-white weekly wage gaps among women would be between 13% and 28% lower than where they stand today. The effect of deunionization on racial wage inequality among males is less substantial, but union decline has greatly eroded wage levels among black men. Together these results recast organized labor as a remarkably inclusive institution vital for its economic support of African-Americans. The crumbling of this institution points to the need to move beyond class-based discussions of union decline to an understanding of the role unions played in mitigating racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wage disparities between white and African-American females in the private sector have grown dramatically in recent decades, nearly tripling during the 1980s and 1990s. During this time period, deunionization reduced black representation rates in the private sector from nearly one in four female workers to less than one in ten. In this article, we assess deunionization's contribution to widening racial wage disparities among female private sector workers. Despite evidence of attribution bias in private sector unions, results still indicate that in recent years race gaps among women would be nearly 30 percent lower if unions remained as strong as they were in the late 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate public attitudes toward military veterans and compare them against attitudes toward private military contractors. We also examine how public attitudes toward veterans differ based on the nature of the military experience, focusing especially on the effect of deployment and combat experience relative to service inside the Continental U.S. We use data from a nationally representative survey that incorporates an experimental design, allowing us to assess the extent to which attitudes toward military veterans and private contractors differ, and whether attitudes toward individuals vary based on combat experience, deployment status. In brief, we find people view combat veterans in sometimes contradictory ways, as having more problems, but deserving more help. The public is more likely to assume that such combat veterans have substance, violence, and psychological problems, and they also are more likely to believe that these veterans should be treated preferentially by employers and helped by government programs. Contrary to a prediction of labeling theory (Link et al. 1987), they do not tend to want disproportionately to avoid combat veterans, or to desire greater social distance from such veterans, even while veterans are perceived to have psychological, substance and aggression problems. Instead, they appear to want to less social distance from and to provide more help to such veterans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]