New evidence of generational progress for Mexican Americans.

U.S.-born Mexican Americans suffer a large schooling deficit relative to other Americans, and standard data sources suggest that this deficit does not shrink between the 2nd and later generations.

Heterogeneity in the effect of public health insurance on catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenditures: the case of Mexico.

Low- and middle-income countries increasingly provide broad-based public health coverage to their residents. One of the goals of such programmes is to reduce the extent to which beneficiaries incur catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditures on health care. A recent field experiment showed that on average Mexico's new public insurance programme reduced such expenditures in rural areas.

Bounding the effects of social experiments: accounting for attrition in administrative data.

Background: Social experiments frequently exploit data from administrative records. However, most administrative data systems are designed to track earnings or benefit payments among residents within a single state. When an experimental participant moves across state lines, his entries in the data system of his state of origin consist entirely of zeros.

Influences of social and style variables on adult usage of African American English features.

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the influences of selected social (gender, employment status, educational achievement level) and style variables (race of examiner, interview topic) on the production of African American English (AAE) by adults.

Method: Participants were 50 African American men and women, ages 20-30 years. The authors used Rapid and Anonymous Survey (RAS) methods to collect responses to questions on informal situational and formal message-oriented topics in a short interview with an unacquainted interlocutor.

Medicaid expansions and welfare contractions: offsetting effects on prenatal care and infant health?

Most states have adopted administrative measures to encourage the use of prenatal care among medicaid-eligible women. At the same time, declining welfare caseloads have caused many women to lose medicaid. We examine the effects of changes in income eligibility, administrative procedures, and welfare caseloads using data from all birth certificates for 1990-1996.