This is a brief data post illustrating trends in marriage and fertility by race during all years for which data is available. I decided to make this post after failing to find useful charts clearly documenting this information. So I constructed the charts that I wanted by piecing together information from different publications of CDC and Census data. All of the data is (at the moment) publicly available online and all of my charts/calculations are available in a Google spreadsheet that is cited in each section.
In this post, I document rates of risky sexual behaviors by race and sex in the United States. The data is based on surveys conducted by the CDC on nationally representative samples of high school students between 1991 and 2021. The data generally show patterns that are in line with other patterns regarding engagement in undesirable behavior: black students generally report greater rates of risky behavior than white and Hispanic students, who both report greater rates than Asian students. However, most of the racial disparities have decreased significantly in the past 10 years, leaving very small or even reversed gaps in the most recent surveys.
This post reviews studies the estimate the effect of parental SES on offspring cognitive outcomes, after controlling for parental cognitive ability. The results show that parental SES has only weak associations with offspring cognitive outcomes after controlling for parental cognitive ability. Specifically, parental income consistently has weak or insignificant effects on offspring cognitive outcomes after such controls. By contrast, parental cognitive ability has robust associations with offspring cognitive outcomes even after controlling for parental SES and observablehome/parenting factors.
In this post, I analyze racial disparities in violent crime across different regions in the United States. Relying on publicly available data published by the CDC, the FBI, and the Census, I perform different analyses on racial differences in violent crime at the state-level, county-level, and city-level. For example, I consider differences in violent crime commission or victimization rate, percentage of violent crime offenders or victims by race, correlations by racial demographics and violent crime rate, and regression analyses to estimate the association between racial demographics and violent crime controlling for socioeconomic variables.
In this post, I will review studies that compare the predictive validity of youth cognitive and parental socioeconomic status (SES) on future socioeconomic outcomes based on large national representative longitudinal samples in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, and Germany . The measures of both parental SES and socioeconomic outcomes are primarily comprised of educational attainment, occupational attainment, and income. The studies converge on the conclusion that youth cognitive ability is by far the superior predictor of socioeconomic outcomes.