Volume 29, Number 4 (Fall) 1994
Lam, David, and Robert F. Schoeni. 1994. "Family Ties and Labor Markets in the United States and Brazil." Journal of Human Resources 29(4):1235-1258.
We use comparable surveys from Brazil and the United States to examine "vertical" and "horizontal" connections between families. Motivated by a model of assortative mating and intergenerational transmission of schooling and earnings, we include the schooling of relatives in male wage equations. We find that the effect of father-in-law's schooling is larger than the effect of father's schooling in Brazil, while the opposite is observed in the United States. We interpret these effects as indicators of unobservable worker characteristics, with differences in assortative mating and female labor market activity explaining the differences in the apparent effect of fathers and fathers-in-law in the two countries.
David Lam is an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Robert Schoeni is an associate economist at RAND. The authors acknowledge helpful comments of Ricardo Barros, John Strauss, Duncan Thomas, and two anonymous referees. Support for this research was provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NICHD Grant No. R01-HD19624), the Fulbright Commission, the program for International Partnerships of the University of Michigan, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Institituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro, The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in June 1995through June 1998 from David Lam, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, 1225 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
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