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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Education And The Age Profile Of Literacy Into Adulthood, Elizabeth Cascio, Damon Clark, Nora Gordon Jan 2008

Education And The Age Profile Of Literacy Into Adulthood, Elizabeth Cascio, Damon Clark, Nora Gordon

Dartmouth Scholarship

American teenagers perform considerably worse on international assessments of achievement than do teenagers in other high-income countries. This observation has been a source of great concern since the first international tests were administered in the 1960s. But does this skill gap persist into adulthood? We examine this question using the first international assessment of adult literacy, conducted in the 1990s. We find that, consistent with other assessments of the school-age population, U.S. teenagers perform relatively poorly, ranking behind teenagers in the twelve other rich countries surveyed. However, by their late twenties, Americans compare much more favorably to their counterparts abroad: …


Will The Stork Return To Europe And Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations, James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, Ariel Dora Stern Jan 2008

Will The Stork Return To Europe And Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations, James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, Ariel Dora Stern

Dartmouth Scholarship

We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home production. We observe three distinct phases in women's status generated by the gradual increase in women's workforce opportunities. In the earliest phase, characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, women earn low wages relative to men and are expected to shoulder all of the child care at home. As a result, most women specialize in home production …