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Drawing on U.S. decennial census data and on Israeli census and longitudinal data, we compare the educational levels and earnings assimilation of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in the United States and Israel during 1968-2000. Because the doors to both countries were practically open to FSU immigrants between 1968 and 1989, when FSU immigrants were entitled to refugee visas in the United States, the comparison can be viewed as a natural experiment in immigrants' destination choices. The results suggest that FSU immigrants to the United States are of significantly higher educational level and experience significantly faster rates of earnings assimilation in their new destination than their counterparts who immigrated to Israel. We present evidence that patterns of self-selection in immigration to Israel and the United States--on both measured and unmeasured productivity-related traits--is the main reason for these results. When the immigration regulations in the United States changed in 1989, and FSU Jewish immigrants to the United States had to rely on family reunification for obtaining immigrant visas, the adverse effects of the policy change on the type of FSU immigrants coming to the United States were minor and short-lived As early as 1992, the gaps in the educational levels between FSU immigrants coming to Israel and to the United States returned to their pre-1989 levels, and the differences in earnings assimilation of post-1989 immigrants in the United States and Israel are similar to the differences detected in the 1980s.

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In this article, the authors examine the role of labor force attachment (LFA) in shaping the diverging wage trajectories of White, Black, and Hispanic women during their first postschooling decade. The authors take advantage of the longitudinal aspects of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth work history data by constructing detailed annual and cumulative measures of LFA and use them to examine women's wage profiles. The findings show constant racial and ethnic wage gaps among women with college education and a widening race gap among women with no college degree. The latter pattern emphasizes the importance of market-related processes in generating wage inequality among unskilled women. The authors document substantial racial and ethnic gaps within this group in the accumulation of LFA, especially immediately after the transition from school to work. This deficit in labor market experience plays a critical role in creating the diverse wage trajectories of White, Black, and Hispanic women with no college education.Recent indicators reveal appreciable wage disparities between minority and White women (

The author argues that because almost all Israeli wage earners were covered by collective agreements in the early 1980s, neither the "collective voice" hypothesis nor the earnings premium hypothesis-the two prevailing explanations of workers' decision to join unions-was then applicable to Israel. Using 1982 survey data on Israeli workers, he examines four alternative explanations of unionization in Israel: nonwork benefits; political ideology; social values, especially workers' attitude toward unions as a means for solidarity; and work and demographic attributes, such as employing unit size, gender, ethnicity, education, and age. He finds that Israeli workers' decision to join the Israeli Federation of Labor-the Histadrut-can be explained in part by nonwork benefits of the Histadrut (health insurance and legal aid, for example) and by the workers' social values.One of the key questions in the study of labor unions is why workersjoin them. Most research addressing this question places a heavy emphasis on either the "collective voice" provided to workers by labor unions or the union premium added to workers' earnings. As a result, the possible role of such other factors as non-work benefits, political ideology, social values, and work and demographic attributes is often ignored.Some unique characteristics of the industrial relations system in Israel in past years make it a useful setting for studying workers' decision to join unions. In particular, in Israel the two prevailing explanations of workers' decision to join unions *Yitchak Haberfeld is Senior Lecturer of Industrial Relations at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He thanks Anat Milner and Yasmin Alkalay for assistance, Dalia Moore and Eppie Yaar for providing their data, and Yinon Cohen, Herbert Heneman III, and Yehouda Shenhav for comments and suggestions.were (until recently) irrelevant. First, the collective voice explanation could be ruled out because almost all wage earners in Israel were covered by collective agreements and were thus protected by unions regardless of their union status. Second, the union premium explanation was inapplicable because there was no union earnings premium in Israel. Whereas empirical research on this subject usually is faced with a hypothesized reciprocity between union status and earnings and, therefore, difficulty in deriving unbiased estimates of the effect of the union premium on the decision to join, the absence of a union effect on earnings in Israel provides a quasi-experimental setting in which we can derive Additional results, and copies of the programs used to generate the results presented here, are available from Yitchak Haberfeld at