estimate the relationship between exposure to volatile income during childhood and a set of socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. The empirical framework is an augmented intergenerational income mobility model that includes controls for income volatility. I measure income volatility at the family level in two ways. First, instability as measured by squared deviations around a family-specific mean, and then as percent changes of 25 % or more. Volatility enters the model both separately and interacted with income level. I find that family income volatility during childhood has a modest negative association with educational attainment. Volatility has a smaller descriptive role in explaining intergenerational outcomes relative to permanent income. Across the income distribution, the negative association between volatility exposure and educational attainment is largest for young adults from low and middle income families. 1

Regina S. Baker is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Duke University and a research fellow at

Several authors have speculated that differences in parental involvement across parents’ educational attainment may influence the intergenerational transmission of education; however, these literatures have yet to be formally integrated. We begin to fill this gap in the literature by estimating augmented intergenerational mobility models that include measures of parental involvement and children’s participation in “school like ” summer activities using rich data from the Child and Young Adult Supplement to the National Longitudinal Survey (NLSY79). Adding parental involvement and summer activity measures to the vector of standard socioeconomic controls does not change the estimated intergenerational transmission of education coefficient. Participation in summer activities significantly influences children’s educational attainment, and the transmission of education operates at least partially through highly-educated mothers facilitating their children’s participation in stimulating summer activities.

Laissez-faire is for the very strong or (imposed upon) the very weak. Countries which successfully change the structure of comparative advantage and their place in the international division of labour (the NICs) are in between (Hettne, 1993, p. 217). This article contains an examination of whether free trade coupled with the neoliberal principles of the Washington Consensus has been turned into a defensive strategy used by developed countries in order to maintain and perpetuate the division of labour in the global market between developed and developing countries. The question is raised of whether developed countries are worried that some highly populated emerging economies may follow the path of the newly industrialized economies. As a pre-emptive measure, developed countries adopt free trade as a defensive mechanism that would create a level playing field or “fair trade ” in the global market and would deliberately stifle infant, high value added industries from thriving within emerging economies. On a level playing field, infant industries cannot compete against the wellestablished corporations of developed countries. Finally, free trade also leads to another indirect outcome: it intensifies competition among developing economies in low value added goods and consequently lessens a rise in the income of unskilled labour in these economies.