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Antman and Duncan (2014, 2015) document how racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. The main contribution of our work was to show that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. A coding error was recently brought to our attention that resulted in 0.55% of our sample being misclassified in terms of their African ancestry. This paper provides details of the coding error and explores its implications. Although the error only affected a tiny percent of the overall sample, correcting it changes the conclusion of how multiracial blacks respond to state affirmative action bans, from a negative and statically significant effect to a small positive and statistically significant effect. Correcting the error does not change the conclusions for individuals with only or no African ancestry. None of the Asian ancestry classifications were affected by the coding error and thus none of the results for Asians were impacted. In addition, we present an updated analysis using more detailed ancestry classifications and more recent years of data. We continue to find that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy, albeit with a different conclusion for multiracial blacks, and are now able to distinguish stronger effects for multiracial individuals with more distant connections to their minority group.

Numerous studies find that U.S.-born Hispanics differ significantly from non-Hispanic whites on important measures of human capital, including health. Nevertheless, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify immigrants' U.S.-born descendants. This can lead to bias due to "ethnic attrition," which occurs whenever a U.S.-born descendant of a Hispanic immigrant fails to self-identify as Hispanic. This paper shows that Mexican American ethnic attritors are generally more likely to display health outcomes closer to those of non-Hispanic whites. This biases conventional estimates of Mexican American health away from suggesting patterns of assimilation and convergence with non-Hispanic whites.

This paper explores the labor market and schooling effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which provides work authorization to eligible immigrants along with a temporary reprieve from deportation. The analysis relies on a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the discontinuity in program rules to compare eligible individuals to ineligible, likely undocumented immigrants before and after the program went into effect. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we focus on youths that likely met DACA's schooling requirement when the program was announced. We find that DACA reduced the probability of school enrollment of eligible higher-educated individuals, as well as some evidence that it increased the employment likelihood of men, in particular. Together, these findings suggest that a lack of authorization may lead individuals to enroll in school when working is not a viable option. Thus, once employment restrictions are relaxed and the opportunity costs of higher-education rise, eligible individuals may reduce investments in schooling.

It is almost universally assumed that race is an exogenously given trait that is not subject to change. But as race is most often self-reported by individuals who must weigh the costs and benefits of associating with minority groups, we ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. To address this question, we link racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies in higher education, contracting, and employment. Consistent with supporting evidence showing that individuals from underrepresented minority groups face an incentive to identify under affirmative action, we find that once affirmative action is outlawed, they are less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, we find that individuals from overrepresented minority groups, who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action, are more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action is banned. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a causal relationship between racial self-identification and economic incentives in the United States. As such, it has broad implications for understanding the impact of affirmative action policies, estimating broader trends in racial disparities, and the emerging literature on the construction of race and individual identity.

This paper considers the relationship between work status and decision-making power of the head of household and his spouse. I use household fixed effects models to address the possibility that spousal work status may be correlated with unobserved factors that also affect bargaining power within the home. Consistent with the hypothesis that greater economic resources yield greater bargaining power, I find that the spouse of the head of household is more likely to be involved in decisions when she has been employed. Similarly, the head of household is less likely to be the sole decision-maker when his spouse works.

This paper addresses the effects of migration on families left behind and offers new evidence on the impact of migration on elderly parents. After discussing the identification issues involved in estimation, I review the literature on the effects of migration on the education and health of non-migrant children as well as the labor supply of non-migrant spouses. Finally, I address the impact of adult child migration on contributions toward non-migrant parents as well as the effects on parental health. Results show that elderly parents receive lower time contributions from all of their children when one child migrates.

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can overcome these difficulties, allowing estimation of non-linear income dynamics and testing for the presence of poverty traps. The paper explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity in income dynamics to account for the possibility that particular groups of individuals may face traps, even if the average individual does not. These methods are used to examine the evidence for a poverty trap in labor earnings, income, and expenditure in Mexico and are compared to panel data estimates from a short rotating panel. The results do find evidence of nonlinearities in household income dynamics and demonstrate large bias in the panel data estimates. Nevertheless, even after allowing for heterogeneity and accounting for measurement error, the paper finds no evidence of the existence of a poverty trap for any group in the sample.

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the panel. This paper shows that dynamic pseudo-panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in the presence of non-classical measurement errors. These methods are applied to data on earnings from a Mexican quarterly rotating panel. Absolute mobility in earnings is found to be very low in Mexico, suggesting that the high level of inequality found in the cross-section will persist over time. However, the paper finds conditional mobility to be high, so that households are able to recover quickly from earnings shocks. These findings suggest a role for policies which address underlying inequalities in earnings opportunities.