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Recent Scientific Accomplishments Over the past three years, Sanders has been part of four broad research programs: (1) the economic consequences of teenage childbearing on women and children, (2) economic shocks and the effects on workers and families, (3) gay and lesbian families and their performance in the U.S. economy, and (4) gender and racial wage differences among the highly educated. In the first research program, Hotz, McElroy and Sanders, in their Journal of Human Resource article, examined the impact of teenage childbearing on the adult outcomes of women, exploiting the fact that some teen pregnancies end in a spontaneous miscarriage. Using miscarriages as an instrument, they find teenage childbearing has intertemporal impacts on earnings and welfare receipt. Labor supply is lowered and the receipt of public assistance is raised for a few years after the teen gives birth, but subsequently labor supply rises and public assistance falls. For the second research question, Sanders and co-authors have written a number of papers that demonstrate how the availability of high-skilled jobs for low-skilled workers affects the use of disability and welfare, how it affects incentives to complete high school and how it affects marriage and fertility ?the “Wilson Hypothesis.? Using the deindustrialization of steel producing areas and the rise and fall of coal areas in Appalachia, they show that disability and AFDC receipt rose with the fall in the steel and coal mining industries and fell when coal mining boomed during the OPEC oil embargo. At least part of these changes comes through changes in marriage and fertility. They also showed that high-paying jobs for low-skilled men lowered high school completion rates, the downside of a buoyant economy. These papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Public Economics, and Industrial and Labor Review. Sanders’s third research program investigates gay and lesbian families. Sanders has completed a series of papers on the earnings, family structure and location decisions of gays and lesbians in the U.S. These have been published in Demography and Industrial Labor Relations Review. The emergence of solid demographic studies describing the gay and lesbian population is valuable for the public policy debate as well as for helping social scientists understand a wide range of important theoretical questions—questions about the general nature of labor market choices, human capital accumulation, specialization within households, discrimination, and geographic location decisions. Finally, Sanders has published a series of papers on earnings differentials among highly educated workers. These papers have been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Economic Inquiry. These papers show that among the highly educated, much of the differences in earnings between majority and minority groups can be attributed to a small number of pre-market factors ?measurement error in the recording of education, language skills and college major. Sanders is the principal investigator (PI) on the MPRC R24 Infrastructure Grant. In addition, Sanders is a co-investigator on a contract from NICHD on "Explaining Family Change and Subgroup Variation." He is PI on a contract from the Appalachian Regional Commission and has a pending grant entitled, "The Role of Firms in Immigrant Assimilation and Labor Market Adjustment (with John Haltiwanger) at NICHD. Sanders will continue his work on the effects of economic shocks by exploiting the internal decennial census data files developed at MPRC. The 1960-1990 decennial Census data will have the geographic detail to allow Sanders to study rural Appalachian families during coal mining booms and busts. His new project on immigration exploits unemployment insurance state earnings records matched to the 2000 Decennial long form. With John Haltiwanger, Sanders will study the earnings dynamics of immigrants, how firms adjust to incorporate immigrant labor, and the competition between immigrant and native-born workers in the U.S. labor market. | ||||||||
Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743