Objective. This article questions what factors are associated with joining the military after high school rather than attending college, joining the civilian labor force, or doing some other activity. Three areas of influence on military enlistment are highlighted: educational goals, the institutional presence of the military in communities, and race and socioeconomic status. Method. The analysis uses data from a recent cohort of high school graduates from the State of Texas in 2002, when the United States was at war, and employs multinomial logistic regression to model the correlates of post-high-school choice of activity in this cohort. Results. Results confirm the hypothesis that a higher military institutional presence increases the odds of enlisting in the military relative to enrolling in college, becoming employed, or doing some other activity after high school. Additionally, college aspirations are clearly associated with the decision to enroll in college versus enlist and also increase the odds of joining the military rather than the civilian labor market, or remaining idle. Unlike previous studies, few racial and ethnic differences are found. Conclusion. Voluntary military enlistment during wartime is associated college aspirations, lower socioeconomic status, and living in an area with a high military presence.

Why have African-American private-sector unionization rates surpassed those of white workers for decades, and how has private-sector union decline exacerbated black-white wage inequality? Using data from the Current Population Survey (1973–2007), the authors show that African-Americans join unions for protection against discriminatory treatment in nonunion sectors. A model-predicted wage series also shows that, among women, black-white weekly wage gaps would be between 13% and 30% lower if union representation remained at high levels. The effect of deunionization on racial wage inequality for men is less substantial, but without deunionization, weekly wages for black men would be an estimated $49 higher. The results recast organized labor as an institution vital for its economic inclusion of African-American men and women. This study points to the need to move beyond class-based analyses of union decline to an understanding of the gendered role unions once played in mitigating racial inequality.

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Prior research finds that minority populations in the United States secure union employment as part of the process of economic incorporation. Yet little work systematically tests whether this pattern holds for the nation's largest minority, Hispanics, during recent decades of union decline. After juxtaposing traditional labor market position theories of unionization with solidaristic accounts, we use 1973 to 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) data to provide the most comprehensive analysis of Hispanics and organized labor in the United States to date. We disaggregate the Hispanic population by citizenship, nationality, and time since arrival to uncover subpopulation differences in the odds of union membership. Additional analyses take advantage of the CPS structure to target individuals who join a union, allowing us to test whether organized labor's much-publicized efforts to incorporate recent immigrants have resulted in detectable gains. Consistent with solidaristic accounts of labor organization, results suggest that certain Hispanic subpopulations—especially those born in the United States and immigrants who have secured citizenship—have higher unionization odds and join unions at higher rates than do U.S.-born whites, even after controlling for traditional positional accounts of labor organization. However, the large substantive effects of positional variables, such as sector, occupation, and firm size, indicate that organized labor's revival depends on more than any one group's capacity for collective action.

Political relationships often vary over time, but standard models ignore temporal variation in regression relationships. We describe a Bayesian model that treats the change point in a time series as a parameter to be estimated. In this model, inference for the regression coefficients reflects prior uncertainty about the location of the change point. Inferences about regression coefficients, unconditional on the change-point location, can be obtained by simulation methods. The model is illustrated in an analysis of real wage growth in 18 OECD countries from 1965–1992.