Why are children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) substantially less likely to be enrolled in child care? We study whether barriers in the application process work against lower-SES children — the group known to benefit strongest from child care enrollment.
We investigate public preferences for equity-enhancing policies in access to early child care, using a survey experiment with a representative sample of the German population (n ≈ 4, 800).
The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on.
The Perry Preschool Project, the longest-running experimental study of an early childhood education program, demonstrates how such interventions can yield long-term personal, societal, and intergenerational benefits for disadvantaged populations.
Reading skills are crucial for academic success and long-term educational attainment. However, children from disadvantaged backgrounds read less than their more privileged peers.
This paper estimates the impact of the Free Education Policy, a major education reform implemented in rural China in 2006, as a natural experiment on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills.
Racial disparities in infant health conditions have persisted for decades. However, there is surprisingly limited evidence regarding the long-term consequences of these disparities.
In the US, the likelihood of a married woman entering the labor force in a given month increases by 60% if her husband loses his job, known as the added worker effect. However, only 1.5% to 3.5% of married women entering the labor force in a given month can be added workers.
We study the impacts of a prenatal and infancy home visiting program targeting disadvantaged families on mental health outcomes, assessed through diagnostic interviews.
Across many countries, women enroll in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields less often than men. Using Taiwanese data from 2011–2018, we unpack the drivers of this gap. We find the gap in STEM enrollment largely reflects a gap in STEM applications.
A recent comment published in Science argues that the evidence on the long-term effects of early childhood education is unsettled. We qualify this comment and contrast it with comprehensive studies based on established principles of scientific practice. Burchinal et al.
This paper studies the interaction between parental and public inputs in children’s skill formation. We perform a longer-run follow-up study of a randomized controlled trial that increased preschool quality and initially improved skills significantly for children of all backgrounds.
Converging labor market opportunities of men and women have altered the economic incentives for how families invest monetary and time resources into the skill development of their children.
We explore the fundamental question of selection in Medicare Advantage by exploiting quasi-experimental variation from the Initial Enrollment Period for Medicare eligibility to evaluate and describe participation in Medicare Advantage.
In this study we develop measures of the potential value of information with an emphasis on observed information – data. Though value is a relative concept, developing approximate and applicable measures is essential.
This paper examines the scalability of the results from the Tennessee Student- Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project, a prominent educational experiment.
Among high-income countries, fertility rates differ significantly, with some experiencing total fertility rates as low as 1 to 1.3 children per woman. However, the reasons behind low fertility rates are not well understood.
We combine the Decennial Census, credit reports, and administrative earnings to create the first panel dataset linking parent’s credit access to the labor market outcomes of children in the U.S.
Under China’s household registration (hukou) system, children with rural hukou lack equal access to education in urban areas. This paper investigates the causal effect of hukou status on children’s education by exploiting an exogenous change in hukou status induced by the hukou reform in 1998.
Using linked records from the 1880 to 1940 full-count United States decennial censuses, we estimate the effects of parental exposure to compulsory schooling (CS) laws on the human capital outcomes of children, exploiting the staggered roll-out of state CS laws in the late nineteenth and early twe
This paper studies the mechanisms and the extent to which parental wage risk passes through to children’s skill development.
Teachers account for less than 5% of the workforce but have disproportionate impacts on the achievements of future generations. This paper studies how the reward structure of teachers affects income inequality at the aggregate level.
This paper considers the problem of making inferences about the effects of a program on multiple outcomes when the assignment of treatment status is imperfectly randomized.
In a sample of Korean adoptees who have been quasi-randomly assigned to US adoptive families and who have been genotyped, we examine the influences and interplay of genetics (“nature”) and shared family environment (“nurture”) on a suite of outcomes.
This paper examines the econometric causal model and the interpretation of empirical evidence based on thought experiments that was developed by Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo.
We present the first causal evidence on the persistent impact of enduring competition on prosociality.
It is well documented that children often "inherit" the occupations of their parents. This paper studies the role of early occupational aspirations in determining later life outcomes, a potentially important channel for intergenerational correlations in occupations.
We develop a method that identifies the effects of nationwide policy, i.e., policy implemented across all regions at the same time.
We derive an optimal labor income tax rate formula for urban models that nests the Mirrlees model as a limiting case. Optimal tax rates are determined by traditional forces plus a new term arising from urban forces: house price, migration and agglomeration effects.
College-educated mothers spend substantially more time in intensive childcare than less educated mothers despite their higher opportunity cost of time and working more hours.
How should we compare welfare across pension systems in presence of differential mortality? A commonly used standard utilitarian criterion implicitly favors the long-lived over the short-lived. We investigate under what conditions this ranking is reversed.
Selection bias in genome-wide association studies (GWASs) due to volunteer-based sampling (volunteer bias) is poorly understood. The UK Biobank (UKB), one of the largest and most widely used cohorts, is highly selected.
We investigate to what extent volunteer-based sampling of large-scale biobanks biases associations and estimate inverse probability (IP) weights to correct for such bias.
In theory, unilateral divorce laws alter the private incentive to invest in human capital by permitting either spouse to initiate the division of the marital assets.
This paper studies the consequences of the buildup of a new economic sector—the Norwegian petroleum industry—on investment in human capital.
We provide estimates of the causal impact of shocks to home environments during childhood on the human capital formation of children and their adult earnings, and document how these impacts differ depending on the age of the child when the shock occurs.
This paper studies the link between gender-biased technological change in the agricultural sector and structural transformation in Norway. After WWII, Norwegian farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace the hand milking of cows, a task typically performed by women.
We study the adoption of remote work within cities and its effect on city structure and welfare. We develop a dynamic model of a city in which workers can decide to work in the central business district (CBD) or partly at home.
We estimate health associations across generations and dynasties using information on healthcare visits from administrative data for the entire Norwegian population.
This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of preferences between parents and their children. Specifically, we analyse whether parents transmit patience, the propensity to save, reading habits, and conscientiousness to their children, and how specific parenting styles – i.e.
This paper presents new evidence on educational mobility across three generations in six Latin American countries (LAC). Combining survey information with national census data we build a data set with 50,000 triads of grandparents-parent-children born between 1890 and 1990.
We provide a framework to disentangle the role of preferences and beliefs in health behavior, and we apply it to compliance behavior during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Parole is a major part of a prisoner's interaction with the criminal justice system, and is linked to long-run prisoner outcomes.
We provide the first evidence of the impact of 9/11 on outcomes for Muslims in the US criminal justice system.
We characterize the employment value of different worker-occupation matches and estimate the substitutability of match-specific inputs in production. In an equilibrium model of the U.S. labor market, we examine the responses of employment and wages to shifts in technology and match values.
Economists have mainly focused on human capital accumulation, rather than on the causes and consequences of human capital depreciation in late adulthood.
We study the accumulation of financial competencies in a model of dynamic skill formation. We find evidence of complementarities between financial literacy and risk attitudes. Risk tolerance facilitates experimentation and learning-by-doing.
This paper evaluates the impact of “Coding Girls”, an educational enrichment program designed to address the underrepresentation of women and girls in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in Italy by stimulating young female students’ interest in programming and science
This article analyzes choice between marital and non-marital childbearing based on a conceptual model that considers the repercussions of marriage laws for the individual wellbeing of women and men living in couples.
We examine the effect of co-residence with fathers- and mothers-in-law on married women's employment in India.
Despite long-term interest in whether welfare benefits motivate fertility, evidence from research has not been consistent. This paper contributes new evidence to this debate by investigating the fertility effect of a German welfare reform.
Obesity not only leads to immense medical costs associated with treating obesity-related illness but is also associated with lower employment prospects and earnings. This study shows that sunshine-induced vitamin D may have a preventive effect on obesity for children.
During the 1980s, the wage gap between white women and white men in the US declined by approximately 1 percentage point per year. In the decades since, the rate of gender wage convergence has stalled to less than one-third of its previous value.
When deciding how to allocate their time among different types of investment in their children, parents weigh up the perceived benefits and costs of different activities.
What drives the dynamics of the racial wealth gap? We answer this question using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium heterogeneous-agents model.
This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation.
A primary rationale for public provision of K-12 education and state financing of school spending is that education fosters civic engagement and the development of social capital. However, limited evidence exists on whether and how school spending affects civic engagement.
We provide evidence that the social norm (expectation) of work has a detrimental causal effect on the mental well-being of individuals not able to abide by it.
Increased exposure to gender-role information affects a girl's educational performance. Utilizing the classroom randomization in Chinese middle schools, we find that the increased presence of stay-at-home peer mothers significantly reduces a girl's performance in mathematics.
Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents.
The entry of married women into the labor force and the rise in women's relative wages are amongst the most notable economic developments of the twentieth century.
Two centuries ago, in most countries around the world, women were unable to vote, had no say over their own children or property, and could not obtain a divorce.
We report from a large-scale randomized controlled trial of women empowerment in Tanzania investigating how two different empowerment strategies, economic empowerment and reproductive health empowerment, shape the economic and fertility choices of young women when they transition into adulthood.
Exploiting the randomized expansion of preferential college admissions in Chile, we show they increased admission and enrollment of disadvantaged students by 32%. But the intended beneficiaries were nearly three times as many, and of higher average ability, than those induced to be admitted.
We study how the relative wages of women (to those of men) affect the charitable giving patterns of married couples in the US.
We provide a model to analyze charter school educational practices. Students differ in cognitive ability, motivation, and household income. Student achievement depends on ability, match of their school's curriculum to their ability, and effort.
The demographic transition—the move from a high fertility/high mortality regime into a low fertility/low mortality regime—is one of the most fundamental transformations that countries undertake.
We conduct a randomized controlled trial with households of secondary school students in Bangladesh to investigate how parents adjust their investments in response to three educational interventions: an informational campaign about an educational phone application, an internet data subsidy, and o
There have been more than 500,000 opioid overdose deaths since 2000. To analyze the opioid epidemic, a model is constructed where individuals choose whether to use opioids recreationally, knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of recreational opioid usage.
Intergenerational persistence in studying for elite education is high across the world. We study the role that exposure to high school peers from elite educated families (`elite peers') plays in driving such a phenomenon in Norway.
Early childhood development is a global priority, yet questions remain about how best to support disadvantaged children in low- and middle-income countries.
More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness.
We study how children’s socio-emotional skills and well-being in adolescence are affected by an increase in the duration of parental care during infancy.
This paper reviews the economic literature on subjective expectations in education with a focus on high income countries.
We examine the effect of attending stand-alone technical high schools on the industry of employment choices and within industry earnings premiums of young adults using a regression discontinuity design.
We quantify intergenerational and assortative processes by comparing different degrees of kinship within the same generation.
The importance of investment in early childhood education (ECE) has been widely documented in the literature. Among the benefits, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is its potential to mitigate educational inequality.
How malleable is alcohol consumption? Specifically, how much is alcohol consumption driven by the current environment versus individual characteristics? To answer this question, we analyze changes in alcohol purchases when consumers move from one state to another in the United States.
This paper finds that accounting for the human capital development of children has a quantitatively large effect on the true costs and benefits of providing cash assistance to single mothers in the United States.
If socio-economic status (SES) and genetic variants are both assets in marriage markets, then the two will become associated in spouse pairs, and will be passed on together to future generations.
It is common for mentorship programs to use race, gender, and nationality to match mentors and mentees. Despite the popularity of these programs, there is little evidence on whether mentees value mentors with shared traits.
We estimate doctor value-added and provide evidence on the distribution of physician quality in an entire country, combining rich population-wide register data with random assignment of patients to general practitioners (GPs).
Adverse conditions in early life can have consequential impacts on individuals' health in older age. In one of the first papers on this topic, Barker and Osmond (1986) show a strong positive relationship between infant mortality rates in the 1920s and ischaemic heart disease in the 1970s.
This paper is motivated by the dearth of statistical capacity in the Middle East North Africa region and the unprecedented economic collapse in Lebanon.
This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education.
In this survey, we argue that the economic analysis of fertility has entered a new era.
Federal financial aid depends on a student's Expected Family Contribution (EFC)--the higher her EFC, the less aid she receives.
This paper studies how spousal bargaining power affects consumption patterns of married households in the US, using a detailed barcode-level dataset.
We present a theory of human capital, with its two most essential components, health capital and, what we term, skill capital, endogenously determined within the model.
The UK Universal Credit (UC) welfare reform simplified the benefits system whilst strongly incentivising a return to sustainable employment. Exploiting a staggered roll-out, we estimate the differential effect of entering unemployment under UC versus the former system on mental health.
I study the trade-induced restructuring process using a novel measure of new work that captures the firm’s demand for jobs employing new knowledge, skills, and technologies. To construct measures of new work, I identify newly emerged job titles using word embedding models.
We analyze marital matching on income using an extremely rich Dutch data set containing all income tax files over four years. We develop a novel methodology that directly extends previous contributions to allow for highly flexible matching patterns.
Economists and social scientists have debated the relative importance of nature (one's genes) and nurture (one's environment) for decades, if not centuries. This debate can now be informed by the ready availability of genetic data in a growing number of social science datasets.
This paper studies screening and recruiting policies that restrict or incentivize entry to teacher-colleges.
In many high-income economies, the recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented declines in women’s employment.
We use HMDA rate spread loans to identify lenders involved in riskier lending prior to the foreclosure crisis. We develop a shift-share measure of changes in high rate spread share lender representation in housing submarkets across origination years.
In the period 1960-1980 Gary Becker founded workshops for graduate students in economics, first the Labor Workshop at Columbia University and then the Applications of Economics Workshop at the University of Chicago.
This paper investigates impacts, mechanisms and selection effects of prenatal exposure to multiple shocks, by exploiting the unique natural experiment of the Dutch Hunger Winter.
In areas with an insufficient supply of qualified teachers, delivering instruction through technology may be a solution to provide education.
Parents with a special social status generate spillover to children of others. This paper studies the effect of socially influential peer parents on students.
Early Childhood Interventions (ECI) offering disadvantaged children preschool and family support services in the US show long-lasting health impacts. Can these benefits hold when these programs are offered to all children in contexts with universal healthcare?
The 20th century beheld a dramatic transformation of the family. Some Kuznets style facts regarding structural change in the family are presented.
We present evidence on the role of the social environment for the development of gender differences in competitiveness and earnings expectations.
How informative is historical experience with the minimum wage about the consequences of raising the federal minimum to $15? This paper compares a hypothetical $15 federal minimum to the most recent federal minimum wage increase, in 2007, from $5.15 to $7.25.
Severe gender imbalances coupled with the stark income differences across countries are driving an increase in cross-border marriages in many Asian countries.
We study how educational opportunities change adolescents' gender attitudes in Tanzania, using an experiential education program focused on STEM subjects.
Cognitive abilities are fundamental for decision-making, and understanding the causes of human capital depreciation in old age is especially important in an aging society.
This paper provides new evidence that preventive health care services delivered at schools and provided at a relatively low cost have positive and lasting impacts.
This paper investigates the role of Social Security reforms in explaining the increase in labor supply of older men across cohorts and evaluates the labor response by health status.
The debate on the stringency of licensure exams for prospective public school teachers is on-going, including the recent controversial roll-out of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA).
In this paper, we challenge the conventional idea that an increase in the progressivity of old-age pensions unanimously distorts the labor supply decision of households.
This paper demonstrates multiple beneficial impacts of a program promoting intergenerational mobility for disadvantaged African-American children and their children.
We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change - as measured through an incentivized donation decision - is highly heterogeneous across the population.
We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics.
We document economists' opinions about what is worth knowing and ask (i) which research objectives economic research should embrace and (ii) which topics it should study. Almost 10,000 economic researchers from all fields and ranks of the profession participated in our global survey.
This paper monetizes the life-cycle intragenerational and intergenerational benefits of the Perry Preschool Project, a pioneering high-quality early childhood education program implemented before Head Start that targeted disadvantaged African-Americans and was evaluated by a randomized trial.
This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted 2000-2018 Census-ACS data linked to the SSA’s Numident file, which contains exact date and county of birth.
Child height is a significant predictor of human capital and economic status throughout adulthood. Moreover, non-unitary household models of family behavior posit that an increase in women’s bargaining power can influence child health.
Technological innovation can raise the returns to some skills while making others less valuable or even obsolete.
In the United States, the federal government grants colleges access to a student's Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) which facilitates substantial price discrimination.
Despite the significant influence that peer motivation is likely to have on educational investments during high school, it is difficult to test empirically since exogenous changes in peer motivation are rarely observed.
Based on the sample of The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we investigate the formation of health capital and the role played by genetic endowments, parental SES, and education.
This paper provides a novel constructive identification proof for non-stationary Hidden Markov models. The identification result establishes that only two periods of time are required if one wants to identify transition probabilities between those two periods.
Reporting private information is a key part of economic decision making. A recent literature has found that many people have a preference for honest reporting, contrary to usual economic assumptions.
Willingness to vaccinate and test are critical in the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effects of two measures to increase the support of vaccination and testing: choice architecture and monetary compensations.
Recent estimates are that about 150 million children under five years of age are stunted, with substantial negative consequences for their schooling, cognitive skills, health, and economic productivity.
A growing literature reports significant socio-economic gaps in investments in the human capital of young children.
We study the role of wealth in the marriage contract by developing a model of the household where investments in public goods can be made at the cost of future earnings.
The economic analysis of the "market for marriage" has a long tradition. Two more recent developments have made it the focus of renewed interest: new models of household behavior, and a class of tractable specifications for econometric work.
We study the role of non-cognitive skills (NCS) in university readiness and performance of first-in-family students (FIFS) using both nationally representative survey data and linked survey-administrative data on an incoming student cohort at a leading Australian university.
Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses. So far there has been little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area.
We examine the impact of the global recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic on women’s versus men’s employment.
This paper provides novel insights into the science of scaling by examining an educational mentoring program in Mexico. The analysis encompasses two independent field experiments, and seizes a unique opportunity to learn from the government's implementation of the same intervention.
A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels.
This paper concerns Saez and Stantcheva’s (2016) generalized social marginal welfare weights (GSMWW), which are used to aggregate losses and gains due to the tax system, while incorporating non-utilitarian ethical considerations.
Many American policy analysts point to Denmark as a model welfare state with low levels of income inequality and high levels of income mobility across generations. It has in place many social policies now advocated for adoption in the U.S.
We test whether employment growth of male worker’s initial industry influences earnings growth using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
What are the effects of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s education? Online education is an imperfect substitute for in-person learning, particularly for children from low-income families.
We develop a novel empirical approach to identify the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The essence of our approach is the insight that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather than over time.
Although many students suffer from anxiety and depression, and students often identify school pressure and concerns about their futures as the main reasons for their worries, little is known about the consequences of a selective school environment on students' physical and mental health.
This paper examines the labor market consequences of offshoring. We use the Danish employer-employee matched data together with the newly constructed skill measures to evaluate the effect of offshoring on wages and reallocation of workers within offshorable occupations.
This paper introduces a new graphical tool: the mean deviation concentration curve.
This paper explores students' expectations about the returns to completing higher education and provides first evidence on perceived signaling and human capital effects.
Question: In what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed differences across racial groups in coping, resilience, and optimism, all of which have implications for health and mental well-being?
Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the long-term impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics.
Roughly one third of a cohort drop out of high school across OECD countries, and developing effective tools to address prime-aged high school dropouts is a key policy question.
In recent US recessions, employment losses have been much larger for men than for women. Yet, in the current recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the opposite is true: unemployment is higher among women. In this paper, we analyze the causes and consequences of this phenomenon.
We examine the dynamics of GDP following an economy-wide pandemic shock that curtails physical mobility and the ability to perform certain tasks at work. We examine whether greater reliance on digital technologies has the potential to mediate employment and productivity losses.
We evaluate the impacts of adopting algorithmic predictions of future offending(risk assessments) as an aid to judicial discretion in felony sentencing.
We use the UK Household Longitudinal Study and compare pre- (2017-2019) and post-COVID-19 data (April 2020) for the same group of individuals to assess and quantify changes in mental health among ethnic groups in the UK.
This paper studies whether sibling gender affects personality traits. We use the idea that if parents decide to have a second child, it is random whether they will have a boy or a girl.
We investigate gender differences across socioeconomic and wellbeing dimensions after three months of lockdown in the UK, using an online sample of approximately 1,500 respondents in Prolific, representative of the UK population with regards to age, sex and ethnicity.
The lockdown imposed following the COVID-19 pandemic of spring 2020 dramatically changed the daily lives and routines of millions of people worldwide.
We provide simple tests for selection on unobserved variables in the Vytlacil-Imbens-Angrist framework for Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs).
This paper develops a new framework for estimating the causal impacts on child skills and the mechanisms producing these impacts using data from a randomized control study of a widely evaluated early-childhood home visiting program. We show the feasibility of replicating the program at scale.
Inequality of opportunity strikes when two children with the same academic performance are sent to different quality schools because their parents differ in socio-economic status.
We utilize random assignment of students into classrooms in China middle schools to study the mechanisms behind the spillover of peer parental education on student achievement.
Using uniquely detailed data on primary school children, we show that teachers who hold prejudicial attitudes towards an ethnic group create socially segregated classrooms.
The possibility of reoccurring waves of the novel coronavirus that triggered the 2020 pandemic makes it critical to identify underlying policy-relevant factors that could be leveraged to decrease future COVID-19 death rates.
Although many educational programs have demonstrated the potential to increase student learning, few examples of successful scaling exist. We study the scalability of a home-based reading program that has shown promising results in an experiment within a local government.
To slow the spread of COVID-19, many countries are shutting down non-essential sectors of the economy. Older individuals have the most to gain from slowing virus diffusion. Younger workers in sectors that are shuttered have the most to lose.
Over the last 15 years, 11 states have restricted employers' access to the credit reports of job applicants.
We study individual demand for COVID-19 antibody tests in an incentivized study on a representative sample of the US population. Almost 2,000 participants trade off obtaining an at-home test kit against money. At prices close to zero, 80 percent of individuals want the test.
We derive sharp bounds on the non consumption utility component in an extended Roy model of sector selection. We interpret this non consumption utility component as a compensating wage differential.
We study a dynamic macro model to capture the trade-off between policies that simultaneously decrease output and the rate of infection transmission.
The coronavirus outbreak has caused significant disruptions to people’s lives. We document the impact of state-wide stay-at-home orders on mental health using real time survey data in the US. The lockdown measures lowered mental health by 0.085 standard deviations.
Accurate identification of economic recessions in a timely fashion is a major macroeconomic challenge. The most successful early detector of recessions, the Sahm rule, relies on changes in unemployment rates, and is thus subject to measurement errors in the U.S.
Educational attainment (EA) is influenced by characteristics other than cognitive ability, but little is known about the genetic architecture of these “non-cognitive” contributions to EA.
Numerous studies have considered the important role of cognition in estimating the returns to schooling. How cognitive abilities affect schooling may have important policy implications, especially in developing countries during periods of increasing educational attainment.
Exploiting results from the literature on non-parametric identification, we make three methodological contributions to the empirical literature estimating the matching function, commonly used to map unemployment and vacancies into hires.
A persistent public-private sector difference in returns to skills is one sign that Vietnam’s transition from command to market economy remains incomplete.
We go beyond estimating the effect of college attainment on longevity by uncovering the mechanisms behind this effect while controlling for latent skills and unobserved heterogeneity.
Precipitated by rapid globalization, rising inequality, population growth, and longevity gains, social protection programs have been on the rise in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the last three decades.
Increasing mothers' labour supply in a child's preschool years can cause a reduction in time investments that lead to a negative direct effect on mid-childhood and teenage outcomes. But as mothers' work hours increase, income will rise.
This paper examines the effects of early skill advantages on parental beliefs, investments, and children’s educational outcomes measured up to age 27.
We investigate what accounts for the observed international differences in schooling and fertility, in particular the role of TFP, age-dependent mortality rates and public education policies.
This paper introduces the Big Five personality traits along with other covariates in a job search, matching and bargaining model and investigates how education and personality traits affect job search behavior and labor market outcomes.
We evaluate the impact of an educational program that aims to build inter-ethnic cohesion in schools by developing perspective-taking ability in children. The program takes place in southeastern Turkey, a high-stakes context in which there has been a massive influx of refugees.
The growing gender gap in educational attainment between men and women has raised concerns that the skill development of boys may be more sensitive to family disadvantage than that of girls.
Modern women often face an uneasy choice: dedicating their time to reproductive household work, or joining the workforce and spending time away from home and household duties.
We study local employment, establishment density, and establishment size across industries delivering final consumption, which comprise a substantial fraction of production, shape local amenities, and pay different wages.
We assess the causal effect of the National Kidney Registry (NKR), the largest national kidney-exchange network in the U.S., on kidney-exchange outcomes.
Researchers and policy-makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children.
Recidivism rates are a growing concern due to the high cost of imprisonment and the high rate of ex-prisoners returning back to prison. The factors leading to recidivism are multifaceted, but one policy-relevant and potentially important contributor is the composition of peer inmates.
The multi-decade growth and spatial dispersion of immigrant families in the United States has shifted the composition of US schools, reshaping the group of peers with whom students age through adolescence.
How does one's childhood neighborhood shape political engagement later in life? We leverage a natural experiment that moved children out of disadvantaged neighborhoods to study effects on their voting behavior more than a decade later.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact of an early childhood curriculum intervention on child development. Teachers in rural childcare centers in northeastern Thailand were encouraged to employ the new curriculum, which is based primarily on the HighScope approach.
We analyze the association between spouses' incomes using a rank-rank specification that takes non-linearities along both spouses’ income distribution into account.
According to Troesken (2004), efforts to purify municipal water supplies at the turn of the 20th century dramatically improved the relative health of blacks. There is, however, little empirical evidence to support the Troesken hypothesis. Using city-level data published by the U.S.
Social Security benefit claiming is highly concentrated at two ages, 62 and the full retirement age, which is hard to explain by the program’s incentives. We study claiming and labor supply decisions in a structural framework and provide three main findings.
This study examines the effects of a home visiting program for first-time disadvantaged mothers on mother-child interactions.
By the time children start school, socio-economic gaps are evident in child skills. We document a causal effect of a reform to mothers' education on her child's skills and use mediation analysis to explore the role of parental inputs as mechanisms.
We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation mobility, human capital accumulation and endogenous assignment of workers to tasks to quantitatively assess the aggregate impact of automation and other task-biased technological innovations.
We find substantial and statistically significant detrimental effects of fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children's educational outcomes.
Bequests may be a key driver of late life savings behavior and more broadly, a determinant of intergenerational inequality. However, distinguishing bequest motives from precautionary savings is challenging.
In job applications, job interviews, performance reviews, and a wide range of other environ-ments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance.
While many studies have shown that parental skills are important for child outcomes, whether this derives from non-genetic mechanisms is less clear.
Medicare is the largest government insurance program in the United States, providing coverage for over 60 million people in 2018. This paper analyzes the effects of Medicare insurance on health for a group of people in urgent need of medical care – people with cancer.
We develop a model to predict consumer default based on deep learning. We show that the model consistently outperforms standard credit scoring models, even though it uses the same data.
Aging populations in developing countries have spurred the introduction of public pension programs to preserve the standard of living for the elderly.
Improving productivity among microenterprises is important, especially in low-income countries where market imperfections are pervasive, and resources are scarce. Relaxing credit constraints can increase the productivity of microenterprises.
This paper experimentally estimates medium term impacts of a large-scale and low-cost parenting program targeting poor families in Chile.
Defaults have been shown to have a powerful effect on retirement saving behavior yet there is limited research on who is most affected by defaults and whether this varies based on features of the choice environment.
Prior research has shown that time spent in school does not close the achievement gap between students with low and high socioeconomic status (SES).
We identify the causal effect of mothers' mental health during early - and soon after pregnancy on a range of child psychological, socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes measured between ages 4-16.
We examine the effect of admission to 16 stand-alone technical high schools within the Connecticut Technical High School System (CTHSS) on student educational and labor market outcomes.
Each year, more than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them. Many cities have recently implemented policies aimed at reducing the number of evictions, motivated by research showing strong associations between being evicted and subsequent adverse economic outcomes.
Postgraduate-degree holders comprise a significant share of the workforce and have better labor-market outcomes than workers who only hold a first degree.
We develop a unied empirical framework for child development which nests the key features of two previously parallel research programs, the Child Development literature and the Education Production Function literature.
This paper investigates whether encouraging children to become more physically active in their everyday life affects their primary school performance.
Building on early animal studies, 20th-century researchers increasingly explored the fact that early events – ranging from conception to childhood – affect a child’s health trajectory in the long-term.
We investigate the role of training in reducing the gender wage gap using the UK-BHPS which contains detailed records of training. Using policy changes over an 18 year period we identify the impact of training and work experience on wages, earnings and employment.
We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called Incentivized Resume Rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies.
Informed by the psychological literature and our empirical evidence we provide new insights into the technology of socio-emotional skill formation in middle childhood.
Residential mobility rates in the U.S. have fallen considerably over the past three decades. The cause of the long-term decline remains largely unexplained.
This paper evaluates the effect of a free compulsory education reform in rural China on the incidence of child labor. We exploit the cross-province variation in the roll-out of the reform and apply a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effects of the reform.
We document new facts on the distributions of male wages, male earnings, and household earnings and income (before and after taxes) in the Netherlands and the United States.
This paper presents the first analysis of the life course outcomes through late midlife (around age 55) for the participants of the iconic Perry Preschool Project, an experimental high-quality preschool program for disadvantaged African-American children in the 1960s.
This paper examines the impact of the iconic Perry Preschool Project on the children and siblings of the original participants.
This paper studies the effect of exposure to female and male “high-achievers” in high school on the long-run educational outcomes of their peers.
This paper evaluates the effect of Paid Family Leave (PFL) on breastfeeding, which we identify using California’s enactment of a 2004 PFL policy that ensured mothers up to six weeks of leave at a 55 percent wage replacement rate.
We examine the role of demographics and changing industrial policies in accounting for the rapid rise in household savings and in per capita output growth in China since the mid-1970s.
We compare estimates of the effects of education on health and health behaviour using two different instrumental variables in the UK Biobank data. One is based on a conventional natural experiment while the other, known as Mendelian randomization (MR), is based on genetic variants.
Veil of Darkness tests identify discrimination by exploiting seasonal variation in the timing of sunset to compare the rate that minorities are stopped by police at the same hour of the day in daylight versus darkness.
What are the welfare implications of labor market power?
This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the U.S. in the 1990s, which dramatically limited cash assistance for low-income families, on the next generation as they transition to adulthood.
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) enroll hundreds of millions of subjects and involve many human lives. To improve subjects’ welfare, I propose a design of RCTs that I call Experiment-as-Market (EXAM).
Centralized school assignment algorithms must distinguish between applicants with the same preferences and priorities. This is done with randomly assigned lottery numbers, non-lottery tie-breakers like test scores, or both.
This paper studies two experiments of early childhood development programs in The Gambia: one increasing access to services, and another improving service quality.
White, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s face shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages per unit of human capital compared with those born in the 1940s, and men’s wages declined more than women’s.
This paper studies the impact of changing trends in female labor supply on productivity, TFP growth and aggregate business cycles.
We provide the first evidence on the relationship between disability programs and markers of financial distress: bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, and home sale.
We use rich data on a cohort of English adolescents to analyse the long-term effects of experiencing bullying victimisation in junior high school. The data contain self-reports of five types of bullying and their frequency, for three waves of the data, when the pupils were aged 13 to 16 years.
The equal division of goods is a long-existing social norm present in societies around the world. In order to ensure that the egalitarian norm is followed, people engage in costly enforcement of norm-violating behavior.
We investigate the elasticity of moral ignorance with respect to monetary incentives and social norm information. We propose that individuals suffer from higher moral costs when rejecting a certain donation, and thus pay for moral ignorance.
The global economy is full of paradoxes. Despite progress in technology, reducing poverty, and increasing life expectancy, the poorest states lag behind, and there is increasing inequality and anomie in the wealthiest ones.
We examine the effects of the 2016 and 2012 U.S. presidential election outcomes on the subjective well-being of Democrats and Republicans using large-scale Gallup survey data and a regression discontinuity approach.
The 'boy crisis' prompts the question of whether people interpret inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale distributive experiment involving more than 5,000 Americans.
What are the effects of universal and permanent cash transfers on the labor market? Since 1982, all Alaskan residents have been entitled to a yearly cash dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund.
This paper analyzes the optimal response of the social insurance system to a rise in labor market risk.
We characterize the distribution of permanent-income and quantify the value of assets and human capital in lifetime wealth portfolios.
We use a unique data set of linked birth records from Florida to analyze the intergenerational transmission of health at birth by parental gender.
Inequalities in the opportunity to obtain a good education in low-income countries are widely understood to be related to household resources and schooling quality. Yet, to date, most researchers have investigated the contributions of these two factors separately.
This paper studies the effect of state-owned enterprises on the dynamics of the Chinese urban labor market. Using longitudinal monthly panel data, we document very low dynamics in the labor market, especially in the state sector.
The evaluation of educational programs has accelerated dramatically in the past quarter century. While such evaluations were once almost exclusively conducted in the U.S., they have broadened dramatically across many countries of the world.
Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.
We construct and estimate a model of child development in which both the parents and children make investments in the child’s skill development.
This paper studies optimal education subsidies when parental transfers are unequally distributed across students and cannot be publicly observed.
Parenting decisions are among the most consequential choices people make throughout their lives. Starting with the work of pioneers such as Gary Becker, economists have used the toolset of their discipline to understand what parents do and how parents’ actions affect their children.
In this paper, we extend existing models that use the NLSY 79 to document employer screening and learning by showing that the return to education and ability change with experience.
This paper uses administrative data to measure causal impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect.
China’s college expansion program, which was implemented in 1999, significantly increased the share of college-educated workers in the urban labor force. We find that returns to education were not responsive to changes in local skill supply between then and 2009.
Understanding inequality and devising policies to alleviate it was a central focus of Jan Tinbergen's lifetime research. He was far ahead of his time in many aspects of his work.
We present results from a new data set, the Statistics of Income Mobility Panel, that has been assembled from tax and other administrative sources to provide evidence on economic mobility and persistence in the United States.
This paper tests for the spillover effects of foreclosure within broad neighborhoods.
Is a school’s impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on high-stakes tests, longer-run outcomes, or both?
This paper uses state police stop data in Texas to assess patrol activity. We find that both the types of stops and the allocation of resources over space change in darkness relative to daylight, and that the changes in stop type and manpower allocation are correlated within police officers.
We evaluate the impact of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program that we designed on family well-being among low-income families with young children.
We exploit state variation in licensing laws to study the effect of licensing on occupational choice using a boundary discontinuity design. We find that licensing reduces equilibrium labor supply by an average of 17%-27%.
Using Danish matched employer-employee data, I compare the relative pay of men and women to their relative productivity as measured by production function estimation.
In this paper, we first document trends in the gender composition of academic economists over the past 25 years, the extent to which these trends encompass the most elite departments, and how women’s representation across fields of study within economics has changed.
Birth weight is the most widely used indicator of neonatal health. It has been consistently shown to relate to a variety of outcomes throughout the life cycle. Lower birth weight babies have worse health and cognition from childhood, lower educational attainment, wages, and longevity.
The effect of coworkers on the learning and the productivity of an individual is measured combining theory and data.
Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over one million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains.
Wealth inequality has received considerable attention, with mounting evidence of steady and economically meaningful changes in the concentration of wealth ownership.
We analyze the empirical content of the Roy model, stripped down to its essential features, namely sector specific unobserved heterogeneity and self-selection on the basis of potential outcomes.
This paper draws on household survey data from countries of all income levels to measure how average unemployment rates vary with income per capita. We document that unemployment is increasing with GDP per capita.
This paper examines academic peer effects in college. Unique new data from the Berea Panel Study allow us to focus on a mechanism wherein a student’s peers affect her achievement by changing her study effort.
This paper examines inequality in both leisure and consumption over the past four decades using time use surveys stretching from 1975 to 2016. We show that individual and family characteristics, especially when including work hours, explain most of the long run variation in leisure.
Individuals' medical spending has both necessary and discretionary components which are not, however, separately observable.
We uncover heterogeneity in social preferences with a structural model that accounts for outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences and assigns individuals to endogenously determined preferences types.
This paper investigates gender differentials in citations of articles published in two journals specialized in Demographic Economics, a field that has traditionally attracted relatively large numbers of women researchers.
We show that genetic endowments linked to educational attainment strongly and robustly predict wealth at retirement. The estimated relationship is not fully explained by flexibly controlling for education and labor income.
Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment.
In this paper we examine whether – conditional on other family inputs – bilingual children achieve different outcomes in language and emotional development. Our data come from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) which allows us to analyze children’s language and emotional development in depth.
The black-white differences in marriages in the US are striking. While 83% of white women between ages 25 and 54 were ever married in 2006, only 56% of black women were: a gap of 27 percentage points.
This paper evaluates the effects of the implementation of a structured early stimulation curriculum combined with a nutritional intervention through public large-scale parenting support services for vulnerable families in rural Colombia, known as FAMI, using a clustered randomized controlled tria
Individual life expectancies are easy to calculate from individual mortality rates and provide useful summary measures for individuals making retirement decisions and for policy makers.
We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct socio-emotional scales comparable across cohorts for both boys and girls, using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour.
This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in Top Five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments. Analyzing the job histories of tenure-track economists hired by the top 35 U.S.
We document the time-series of employment rates and hours worked per employed by married couples in the US and seven European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK) from the early 1980s through 2016.
We investigate the role of information frictions in the US labor market using a new nationally representative panel dataset on individuals’ labor market expectations and real- izations. We find that expectations about future job offers are, on average, highly predictive of actual outcomes.
The taxation of bequests can have a positive impact on the labor supply of heirs through wealth effects. This leads to an increase in future labor income tax revenue on top of direct bequest tax revenue.
Just as there are good and bad workers, there are also good and bad employers that will opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, or laws.
This paper studies the impact of schooling intensity on students’ noncognitive skills. It exploits a major school reform that reduced total years in high school but retained the high school curriculum, thereby increasing weekly school hours.
We first document three stylized facts about marriage and fertility in East Asian societies: They have the highest marriage rates in the world, but the lowest total fertility; they have the lowest total fertility, but almost all married women have at least one child.
We develop a framework to understand pre-employment credit screening through adverse selection in labor and credit markets. Workers differ in an unobservable characteristic that induces a positive correlation between labor productivity and repayment rates in credit markets.
Gender differences in current and past job tasks may be crucial for understanding the gender wage gap. We use novel task data to address well-known measurement concerns, including that standard task measures assume away within-occupation gender differences in tasks.
In this paper, we revisit our 2004 paper that found a strong positive association between happiness and future outcomes, based on data for Russia in the years 1995-2000. This paper takes advantage of a new Gallup panel for the U.S. for 2014-2016.
We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and earnings using data on two cohorts of college enrollees. Student ability and college quality strongly improve degree completion and earnings for all students.
In a nationally-representative sample, we predict retirement savings using survey- based elicitations of exponential-growth bias (EGB) and present bias (PB).
China's new Labor Contract Law, which intended to strengthen the labor protection for workers, went into effect on January 1, 2008.
We investigate the welfare implications of two pre-crisis immigration waves (1991– 2000 and 2001–2010) and of the post-crisis wave (2011–2015) for OECD native citizens.
We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question.
We analyze how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects long-run outcomes for students, exploiting the timing of state duty-to-bargain law passage in a cross-cohort difference-in-difference framework.
Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loans Program, we document that parental support and personal savings substantially lower student loan repayment problems.
We use a unique dataset to analyze marriage and union patterns of the European nobility from the 1500s to the 1800s.
In this article, we present overviews of the research on discrimination in mortgage underwriting and pricing, the experiences of minority borrowers prior to and during the financial crisis and federal efforts to mitigate foreclosures during the crisis.
We investigate the impact of childcare provision on cases of child abuse and neglect in Germany between 2002 and 2014. For identification, we exploit a governmental reform introducing mandatory early child care.
Do households value access to free health insurance when making labor supply decisions? We answer this question using the introduction of universal health insurance in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP), in 2002.
By downplaying externalities, magnifying the cost of moral behavior, or suggesting not being pivotal, exculpatory narratives can allow individuals to maintain a positive image when in fact acting in a morally questionable way.
This paper examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85 percent of the inhabitants.
A growing literature documents the positive long-term effects of policy-induced improvements in early-life health and nutrition.
The American family underwent important transformations in the last decades. Mating patterns changed, college graduates and high earners marry with each other more and more frequently.
The intergenerational income elasticity (IGE), ubiquitously estimated in the economic mobility literature, has been misinterpreted as pertaining to the expectation of children’s income when it actually pertains to its geometric mean.
Although the intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) has long been the workhorse measure of economic mobility, this elasticity has been widely misinterpreted as pertaining to the conditional expectation of children’s income when it actually pertains to its conditional geometric mean.
The intergenerational elasticity (IGE) has been assumed to refer to the expectation of children’s income when in fact it pertains to the geometric mean of children’s income.
Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives’ labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia, a country with very low female labor force participation (FLFP).
We examine the labor market consequences of an exogenous increase in the supply of skilled labor in several cities in Norway, resulting from the construction of new colleges in the 1970s.
Intergenerational mobility is often studied using survey data. In such settings, selective unit or item non-response may bias estimates.
The importance of non-cognitive skills in determining long-term human capital and labor market outcomes is widely acknowledged, but relatively little is known about how educational investments by parents may respond to children’s non-cognitive characteristics.
We use a novel survey of poor and near poor urban young adults in Peru to study the role of hope in individuals’ propensity to invest in the future.
When macroeconomic tools fail to respond to wealth inequality optimally, regulators can still seek to mitigate inequality within individual markets.
This paper explores gene-environmental interactions between family environments and children’s genetic scores in determining educational attainment.
We develop and test an economic model of the cognitive and non-cognitive foundations of survey item- response behavior.
Internal locus of control (LOC) is a highly beneficial non-cognitive skill, yet its long-term formation process remains poorly understood.
Over the past two decades, researchers have shown a growing interest in the role of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – children’s confrontation with maltreatment and household dysfunction – in shaping lifetime opportunities.
We provide the first cross-sectoral description of local consumption markets. Detailed credit card data show consumers have limited mobility and manage the spatial dimension of their transactions.
We provide the first cross-sectoral description of local consumption markets. Detailed credit card data show consumers have limited mobility and manage the spatial dimension of their transactions.
In this paper, we study parental beliefs about the returns to different types of investments in school children.
The paper reports the first experimental study on people’s fairness views on extreme income inequalities arising from winner-take-all reward structures.
Estimates from the US suggest that increasing levels of human capital over the second half of the last century accounted for approximately one third of productivity growth, while some estimates of the social rate of return to R&D in the manufacturing sector have exceeded one hundred percent.
In many countries, important thresholds in examinations act as a gateway to higher levels of education and/or good employment prospects. This paper examines the consequences of just failing a key high stakes national examination in English taken at the end of compulsory schooling in England.
Using data from a variety of sources, this paper comprehensively documents the dramatic changes in the manufacturing sector and the large decline in employment rates and hours worked among prime-aged Americans since 2000.
We investigate the determinants and extent of labor market discrimination toward people with physical disabilities using a large scale field experiment. Applications were randomly sent to 1477 private firms advertising open positions.
How was optimism related to mortality before the rise in “deaths of despair” that began in the late 1990s? We show that as early as 1968 more optimistic people lived longer (using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics).
This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality.
Despite growing academic and policy interest in the subjective well-being consequences of emigration for those left behind, existing studies have focused on single origin countries or specific world regions.
Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls non-material resources – specifically, negotiation skills – can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country.
This paper provides the introduction to the special issue on Race and the City in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018.
We evaluate the medium-term impacts of treating maternal depression on women’s financial empowerment and parenting decisions. We leverage experimental variation induced by a cluster-randomized control trial that provided psychotherapy to perinatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan.
Using data from OECD’s PISA, Eurostat and World Bank’s WDI, we explore how child cognitive outcomes at the aggregate country level are related to macroeconomic conditions, specifically government education expenditures and early education experience.
Participation in social programs is often misreported in survey data, complicating the estimation of the effects of those programs. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate treatment effects under endogenous participation and endogenous misreporting.
Administrative data are considered the “gold standard” when measuring program participation, but little evidence exists on the potential problems with administrative records or their implications for econometric estimates.
This paper analyzes the relationship between work-promoting income transfer policies and child development. We provide new comprehensive evidence of the unintended consequences for child development of the Earned Income Tax Credit expansions during the 1990s in the United States.
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other data set in the U.S. Its record of research is truly seminal.
This paper develops the first evidence on how individuals’ union membership status affects their net fiscal impact, the difference between taxes they pay and cost of public benefits they receive, enriching our understanding of how labor relations interacts with public economics.
Screening interventions can produce very different treatment outcomes, depending on the reasons why patients had been unscreened in the first place. Economists have paid scant attention to these complexities and their implications for evaluating screening programs.
It is almost self-evident that social interactions can determine economic behavior and outcomes. Yet, information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets.
The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States.
Internally displaced people (IDPs) constitute a serious economic, social and cultural problem for many countries, including countries in transition. Despite the importance of the problem, there are only a handful of previous studies investigating the issue of labor market outcomes of IDPs.
The macroeconomic consequences of large-scale early childhood development policies depend on intergenerational dynamics, general equilibrium (GE) effects on labor and capital markets, and the deadweight loss of raising taxes to finance the policies.
Studies of intergenerational mobility have largely ignored health despite the central importance of health to welfare. We present the first estimates of intergenerational health mobility in the US by using repeated measures of self-reported health status (SRH) during adulthood from the PSID.
Childhood obesity has adverse health and productivity consequences and poses negative externalities to health services. Its increase in recent decades can be traced back to unhealthy habits acquired in the household.
A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes.
Sectoral labor reallocation shocks change the optimal allocation of workers across industries. We find that a proxy for this type of labor market shocks has very strong and robust predictive power for future stock market returns.
The emergence of slums is a frequent feature of a country's path toward urbanization, structural transformation, and development.
This paper investigates marriage market equilibrium under the assumption that Bargaining In Marriage (BIM) determines allocation within marriage.
Using a representative sample of rural migrants in cities, this paper investigates where the migrants in urban China come from, paying close attention to intra-provincial vs. inter-provincial migrants, and examining the differences in their personal attributes.
This paper studies the welfare effects of encouraging rural-urban migration in the developing world.
We document evidence on preferences for childbearing in developing countries. Across countries, men usually desire larger families than women do.
This paper examines the impact of a property rights reform in rural China that allowed farmers to lease out their land. We find the reform led to increases in land rental activity in rural households.
We document how an anti-poverty program improves economic and subjective wellbeing, and self-sufficiency.
U.S.-born Mexican Americans suffer a large schooling deficit relative to other Americans, and standard data sources suggest that this deficit does not shrink between the 2nd and later generations.
This paper explores inequalities in IQ and economic preferences between children from high and low socio-economic status (SES) families. We document that children from high SES families are more intelligent, patient and altruistic, as well as less risk-seeking.
Cooperativeness among genetically unrelated humans remains a major puzzle in the social sciences. We explore the causal impact of physical distance on willingness to help. In a field setting, participants decide about supporting local refugees at the dispense of money to themselves.
We use the high IQ Terman sample to estimate relationships between education, socioemotional skills, and health-related outcomes that include health behaviors, lifestyles, and health measures across the lifecycle.
We study how parental resources early in life affect children’s health and education exploiting the so-called speed premium (SP) in the Swedish parental leave system.
Subsidies in many health insurance programs depend on prices set by competing insurers – as prices rise, so do subsidies. We study the economics of these “price-linked” subsidies compared to “fixed” subsidies set independently of market prices.
This paper examines the relationship between parents’ access to family planning and the economic resources of their children. Using the county-level introduction of U.S.
That prenatal events can have life-long consequences is now well established. Nevertheless, research on the Fetal Origins Hypothesis is flourishing and has expanded to include the early childhood (postnatal) environment.
We document the representation of female economists on the conference programs at the NBER Summer Institute from 2001-2016. Over the period from 2013-2016, women made up 20.6 percent of all authors on scheduled papers.
To understand the socio-economic enrollment gap in university attendance, we elicit students' beliefs about the benefits of university education in a sample of 2,540 secondary school students.
Health shocks are an important source of risk. People in bad health work less, earn less, face higher medical expenses, die earlier, and accumulate much less wealth compared to those in good health.
Through an analysis of the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 Current Population Surveys, as well as the 2004 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article investigates class differences and patterns of voter turnout for the last four US presidential elections.
In the 1960s at Stanford University’s Bing Preschool, children were given the option of taking an immediate, smaller reward or receiving a delayed, larger reward by waiting until the experimenter returned.
This paper studies the role of match quality for contractual arrangements, wage dynamics and workers’ retention. We develop a model in which profit maximizing firms offer a performance-based pay arrangement to retain workers with relatively high match-specific productivity.
We examine the consequences of underreporting of transfer programs in household survey data for several prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We focus on the Current Population Survey (CPS), the source of official poverty and inequality statistics.
This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants’ economic self-sufficiency and family planning.
We provide theory and evidence that the elasticity of local employment to a labor demand shock is heterogeneous depending on the commuting openness of the local labor market.
This paper analyzes the non-market benefits of education and ability. Using a dynamic model of educational choice we estimate returns to education that account for selection bias and sorting on gains.
I develop a revealed-preference method for estimating neighborhood tipping points. I find that census tract tipping points have increased from 15% (1970) to 42% (2010). The corresponding MSA tipping points have also increased from 13% (1970) to 35% (2010).
We study the formation of wages in a frictional search market where firms can choose either to bargain with workers or post non-negotiable wage offers.
Market design seeks to translate economic theory and analysis into practical solutions to real-world problems.
In standard economic theory, information helps agents optimize. But providing agents with information about the benefits of an action often fails to encourage that action.
Why do insurers choose to exclude medical providers, and when would this be socially desirable? We examine network design from the perspective of a profit-maximizing insurer and a social planner to evaluate the welfare effects of narrow networks and restrictions on their use.
A broadly accepted view contends that the 2007-09 financial crisis in the U.S. was caused by an expansion in the supply of credit to subprime borrowers during the 2001-2006 credit boom, leading to the spike in defaults and foreclosures that sparked the crisis.
We revisit the long-standing question whether there is a relation between animal welfare and human ethics. Therefore, we elicit concern for animal welfare in an incentivized, direct, and real setup: Subjects choose between intensive farming versus organic living conditions for a hen.
This paper shows how women’s relatively higher career cost can explain why in most of the developed countries women go to college at a higher rate than men and earn less on average.
We study the effect of elementary school teachers' beliefs about gender roles on student achievement. We exploit a natural experiment where teachers are prevented from self-selecting into schools, and conditional on school, students are allocated to teachers randomly.
We provide a common set of life-cycle earnings statistics based on administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Sweden. We find three qualitative patterns, which are common across countries. First, top-earnings inequality increases over the working lifetime.
One of the most important decisions a student can make during the course of his or her college career is the choice of major.
We characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income.
We use detailed information from U.S. consumers' credit card purchases to provide the first large- scale description of the geography of consumption. We find that consumers' mobility is quite limited and document significant heterogeneity in the importance of gravity across sectors.
A maturing literature across the social sciences suggests important impacts of the intergenerational transmission of crime as well as peer effects that determine youth criminal activities.
This paper studies the causal effect of status differences on moral disengagement and violence. To measure violent behavior, in the experiment, a subject can inflict a painful electric shock on another subject in return for money.
Lack of skills is arguably one of the most important determinants for high levels of unemployment and poverty. Targeting youth unemployment and also important because of its strong influence on other important social outcomes.
This paper studies how aggregate economic conditions affect marriage markets in developing countries where marriage is regulated by traditional customary norms.
Using a randomized experiment, this study investigates the impact of sustained investment in parenting, from pregnancy until age five, in the context of extensive welfare provision.
We show that optimistic beliefs regarding the role of effort in success, while leading to success, diminish the individual’s sympathy toward the unsuccessful. We generate random variation in the degree of optimism about the productivity of effort via an effective educational intervention.
In order to work legally, 29% of U.S. workers require an occupational license. We show that occupational licensing reduces the racial wage gap between white and black men by 43%, and the gender wage gap between women and white men by 36%-40%.
Among men, the black-white wage gap is as large today as it was in 1950. We test whether the black-white wage gap is due to asymmetric information using newly collected data on occupational licensing laws that ban workers with criminal records. We find evidence supporting this hypothesis.
We exploit naturally occurring variation in the existence, closeness, and dissemination of pre-election polls to identify a causal effect of anticipated election closeness on voter turnout in Swiss referenda. Closer elections are associated with greater turnout only when polls exist.
We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15,000 taxpayers in Norway, who were likely to have misreported their foreign income.
This paper provides insights into the welfare gains of forming a couple by estimating how much of the difference in housework time between single and married individuals is causal and how much is due to selection.
Numerous signaling models in economics assume image concerns. These take two forms, as relating either to social image or self-image. While empirical work has identified the behavioral importance of the former, less is known about the role of enhanced self-image concerns.
Do people give primacy to merit when luck partly determines earnings? This paper reports from a novel experiment where third-party spectators have to decide whether to redistribute from a high-earner to a low-earner in cases where earnings are determined by luck and merit.
The educational attainment of young women now exceeds that of young men in most of the developed world, and women account for about 60% of new four-year college graduates in the United States.
We analyze the financial value of insurance when individuals have access to credit markets. Loans allow consumers to smooth shocks across time, decreasing the value of the smoothing (across states of the world) provided by insurance.
Intergenerational income mobility varies significantly across Canada, with the landscape clustering into four broad regions. These are not geographically contiguous, and provincial boundaries are not the dividing lines.
In this paper we assess properties of commonly used estimates of total effects of obesity on mortality and identify consequences of these properties for inferences.
We develop and estimate a model of study time choices of students on a social network. The model is designed to exploit unique data collected in the Berea Panel Study.
This study exploits plausibly exogenous variation from the youngest sibling’s school eligibility to estimate the effects of parental work on the weight outcomes of older children.
We develop a dynastic human capital investment framework to study the importance of potential market failures--family borrowing constraints and uninsured labor market risk--as well as the process of intergenerational ability transmission in determining human capital investments in children at dif
Explanations of economic growth and prosperity commonly identify a unique causal effect, e.g., institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a theoretical modeling of the interaction between culture and institutions and their effects on economic activity.
We present a theory of the relation between health and retirement that generates testable predictions regarding the interaction of health, wealth and financial incentives in retirement decisions.
The main purpose of this paper is to estimate an equilibrium model of private and public school competition that can generate realistic pricing patterns for private universities in the U.S.
Exploiting a newly constructed dataset on county-level variation in prohibition status from 1933 to 1939, this paper asks two questions: what were the effects of the repeal of federal prohibition on infant mortality?
Human capital, including health and nutrition, has played a key role in the literature on poverty traps. Economic shocks that affect human capital during early life are thought to translate into permanently reduced levels of human capital and, thereby, push individuals into poverty.
We develop a method for estimating the effect of a kinked budget set on workers' employment decisions, and we use it to estimate the impact of the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Annual Earnings Test (AET).
Sweden was early to legalize same-sex partnership (1995), to allow same-sex couples to adopt children (2003), and to offer same-sex couples fertility treatment through the national health system (2005).
The U.S. tuberculosis movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Dedicated to eradicating a specific disease, it was spearheaded by voluntary associations and supported by the sale of Christmas Seals.
We evaluate the effects of home visiting targeted towards disadvantaged first-time mothers on maternal and child health outcomes. Our analysis exploits a randomized controlled trial and combines rich longitudinal survey data with unique administrative health data.
Two common hypotheses regarding the relative benefits of vocational versus general education are (1) that vocational skills enhance relative short-term earnings and (2) that general skills enhance relative long-term earnings. Empirical evidence for these hypotheses has remained limited.
A model of how personality traits affect household time and resource allocation decisions and wages is developed and estimated. In the model, households choose between two modes of behavior: cooperative or noncooperative.
We study the role of risk aversion underlying son preference in patriarchal societies, where sons serve as better insurance for old-age support than daughters. The implications
Brazilian health authorities have recommended that pregnant women take meticulous precaution to avoid mosquito bites, and use contraceptive methods to postpone/delay pregnancies.
While many studies have examined friendship formation among children in conventional contexts, comparatively fewer have examined how the process is shaped by neighborhood violence.
We explore the role of cheap excuses in product choice. If a product improves upon one ethically relevant dimension, agents may care less about other, completely independent ethical facets of the product.
Low Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) constitutes a foregone opportunity at both the macro and at the micro levels, potentially increasing the vulnerability of households and lowering the long-run development perspectives of a country.
This paper studies the causal effect of birth spacing (i.e., the age difference between siblings) on personality traits. We use longitudinal data from a large British cohort which has been followed from birth until age 42.
We investigate whether a policy that bases college admission on relative performance can modify the degree of racial or ethnic segregation in high schools by inducing students to relocate to schools with weaker competition.
We test whether adverse childhood experiences – exposure to parental maltreatment and its indirect effect on health – are associated with age 30 personality traits.
Industrial clusters are promoted by policy and generally viewed as good for growth and development, but both clusters and policies may also enable non- competitive behavior. This paper studies the presence of non-competitive pricing in geographic industrial clusters.
Numerous signaling models in economics assume image concerns. These take two forms, as relating either to social image or self-image. While empirical work has identified the behavioral importance of the former, little is known about the role of self-image concerns.
A large body of evidence documents the educational and labor market returns to birth weight, which are reflected in investments in large social safety net programs targeting birth weight and early life health. However, there is no direct evidence on the private valuation of birth weight.
The last 60 years have seen the emergence of a dramatic socioeconomic gradient in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and childbearing.
We show that the widely used Boston Mechanism (BM) fosters ability and socioeconomic segregation across otherwise identical public schools, even when schools do not have priorities over local students.
This paper examines peer effects in a Chinese middle school where: 1. classes are randomly assigned to teachers, and 2. student quality across classes varies because student assignment is based on a noisy measure of student quality.
We study the impact of health shocks on domestic violence and illicit drug use. We argue that health is a form of human capital that shifts incentives for risky behaviors, such as drug use, and also changes options outside of violent relationships.
How does access to consumer credit affect the allocation of workers to firms, and what happens to sorting and the subsequent recovery if credit tightens during a recession? To answer this question, we develop a labor sorting model with saving and borrowing.
How does consumer credit access impact job flows, earnings, and entrepreneurship?
We analyze the evolution of health insurer costs in Massachusetts between 2010-2012, paying particular attention to changes in the composition of enrollees.
Hirshman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty highlights the role of "voice" in disciplining firms for low quality. We develop a formal model of voice as a relational contact between firms and consumers and show that voice is more likely to emerge in concentrated markets.
Using household-level data from Mexico we document patterns among schooling, entrepreneurial decisions and household characteristics such as assets, talent of household members and age of the household head.
This paper proposes an elementary empirical framework to study behavioral marriage matching models, the Cobb Douglas marriage matching function (CD MMF). It accommodates different kinds of relationships, peer and scale effects, changes in population supplies and gains to relationships.
Using a theoretical model where students care about achievement rank, I study effort choices in the classroom and show that rank concerns generate peer effects.
In this empirical analysis, we estimate the link between formal childcare and child cognitive outcomes, controlling for a large number of variables.
We examine the differential effects of family disadvantage on the education and adult labor market outcomes of men and women using high-quality administrative data on the entire population of Denmark born between 1966 and 1995.
There is a striking difference in income inequality and redistributive policies between the United States and Scandinavia.
We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program with incentives, or to a control group.
What are the macroeconomic and welfare effects of expanding transfers to households with children in the United States? How do childcare subsidies compare to alternative policies?
Using newly collected cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in five countries: France, Italy, Sweden, U.K., and U.S.
This study provides insights on the role of early childhood family environment within the process of preference formation. We start by presenting evidence showing that breastfeeding duration is a valid measure of the quality of early childhood environment.
This paper quantifies and aggregates the multiple lifetime benefits of an influential high-quality early childhood program with outcomes measured through midlife.
We investigate assortative mating on education using a sample of couples from the Health and Retirement Study. We estimate a reduced-form linear matching function, which links wife’s education to husband’s education and both wife’s and husband’s unobservable characteristics.
Studies that can distinguish between exogenous and endogenous peer effects of social interactions are relatively rare. One recent identification strategy exploits partial overlapping groups of peers.
We study the determinants of season of birth, for white married women aged 20-45 in the US, using birth certificate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.
We study the optimal design of R&D policies and corporate taxation when the outputs of innovation are not appropriable in the absence of intellectual property rights policies and there are non-internalized technology spillovers across firms.
Many poor households in developing countries are liquidity-constrained. As a result, they may under-invest in the human capital of their children. We provide new evidence on the long-term (10-year) effects of cash transfers using data from Ecuador.
Parental investments in early childhood have been shown to have a large impact on skill acquisition. In this paper, we examine how beliefs about a child's relative skill influences investment and how these beliefs are determined.
We develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage, labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context. Individuals start by choosing their investments in education anticipating returns in the marriage market and the labor market.
We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which is produced from parental time and human capital.
This paper analyzes how moral costs affect individual support of morally difficult group decisions. We study a threshold public good game with moral costs. Motivated by recent empirical findings, we assume that these costs are heterogeneous and consist of three parts.
Across academic sub-fields such as labor, education, and behavioral economics, the measurement and interpretation of non-cognitive skills varies widely. As a result, it is difficult to compare results on the importance of non-cognitive skills across literatures.
We study the evolution of gender differences in the willingness to assume the decision-maker role in a group, which is a major component of leadership.
We estimate a partial and general equilibrium search model in which firms and workers choose how much time to invest in both general and match-specific human capital.
Intelligence quotient (IQ), grades, and scores on achievement tests are widely used as measures of cognition, yet the correlations among them are far from perfect. This paper uses a variety of data sets to show that personality and IQ predict grades and scores on achievement tests.
Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century.
Student access to education levels, tracks or bachelor specialties is usually determined by their previous performance, measured either by internal exams, designed and graded by teachers in school, or external exams, designed and graded by central authorities.
The effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on obesity have been the focus of much debate.
This paper discusses the relevance of recent research on the economics of human development to the work of the Human Development and Capability Association. The recent economics of human development brings insights about the dynamics of skill accumulation to the literature on capabilities.
This paper examines the sources of differences in social mobility between the U.S. and Denmark. Measured by income mobility, Denmark is a more mobile society, but not when measured by educational mobility. There are pronounced nonlinearities in income and educational mobility in both countries.
Should asset testing be used in means-tested programs? These programs target low-income people, but low income can result not only from low productivity but also from low labor supply. We aim to show that in the asymmetric information environment, there is a positive role for asset testing.
This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. We use an integrated approach exploiting complementarities between controlled lab and representative panel data. In a simple principal-agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task.
This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature.
We study how diffusing being pivotal affects the willingness to support immoral outcomes. Subjects decide about agreeing to kill mice and receiving money versus objecting to kill mice and foregoing the monetary amount.
According to standard dynamic choice theories, patience is a key driving factor behind the accumulation of the proximate determinants of economic development.
This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality.
Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families.
It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child.
In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita.
The probability of being depressed increases dramatically during adolescence and is linked to a range of adverse outcomes. Many studies show a correlation between religiosity and mental health, yet the question remains whether the link is causal. The key issue is selection into religiosity.
Why do crime rates differ greatly across neighborhoods and schools? Comparing youth who were assigned to opposite sides of newly drawn school boundaries, we show that concentrating disadvantaged youth together in the same schools and neighborhoods increases total crime.
This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004-2007.
This paper presents the Global Preference Survey, a globally representative dataset on risk and time preferences, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust.
This paper presents an experimentally validated survey module to measure six key economic preferences { risk aversion, discounting, trust, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity in a reliable, parsimonious and cost-effective way.
We show that socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of many facets of a child's personality. The facets of personality we investigate encompass time preferences, risk preferences, and altruism, as well as crystallized and fluid IQ.
We revisit the empirical relationship between wages and labor market conditions. Following work histories in the NLSY79 we document that the relationship between wages and unemployment rate differs across occupations. The results hold after controlling for unobserved match quality.
In this paper, we study parental beliefs about the technology which maps parental investments into future child outcomes. We document that parents perceive late investments as more productive than early investments, and that they perceive investments in different time periods as substitutes.
The majority of lower socioeconomic status (SES) households in the U.S. and Europe do not have any stock investments, which is detrimental to wealth accumulation.
This paper organizes and synthesizes the literature on early childhood education and childcare. In it, we go beyond meta-analysis and reanalyze primary data sources in a common framework.
This article investigates the impact of an early intervention program, which experimentally modifies the parenting and home environment of disadvantaged families, on child physical health in the first 3 years of life.
This study estimates the effect of a targeted policy intervention on global and experienced measures of maternal well-being. Participants from a disadvantaged community are randomly assigned during pregnancy to an intensive home visiting parenting program or a control group.
This paper is motivated by the fact that nearly half of U.S. college students drop out without earning a bachelor’s degree. Its objective is to quantify how much uncertainty college entrants face about their graduation outcomes. To do so, we develop a quantitative model of college choice.
This paper studies the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. We develop a quantitative model of college choice with uncertain graduation. Departing from much of the literature, we model in detail how students progress through college.
The paper explores the consequences for inequality of the joint evolution, endogenous or exogenous, of social connections and human capital investments.
This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow-up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC).
We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies.
We show that grit, a non-cognitive skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in the childhood period and can be fostered in the classroom environment.
The Grossman model is the canonical theory of the demand for health and health investment. This paper provides strong support for the model’s canonical status. Yet several authors have identified at least four significant limitations to the literature spawned by Grossman’s seminal 1972 papers.
This paper presents a unified theory of human capital with both health capital and, what we term, skill capital endogenously determined within the model.
Rising costs of and returns to college have led to sizeable increases in the demand for student loans in many countries. In the U.S., student loan default rates have also risen for recent cohorts as labor market uncertainty and debt levels have increased.
The economic and social mobility of a generation may be largely determined by the time it enters school given early developing and persistent gaps in child achievement by family income and the importance of adolescent skill levels for educational attainment and lifetime earnings.
We document three new facts about gender differences in executive compensation. First, female executives receive lower share of incentive pay in total compensation relative to males. This difference accounts for 93% of the gender gap in total pay.
We report results from the impact evaluation of a randomized educational intervention targeted at elementary school children. The program uses case studies, stories and classroom activities to improve the ability to imagine future selves, and emphasizes forward-looking behavior.
Maternal mortality was the second largest cause of death for women in childbearing years up until the mid-1930s in the United States. For each death, twenty times as many mothers were estimated to suffer pregnancy related conditions, often leading to severe and prolonged disablement.
We study the aggregate economic effects of diversity policies such as affirmative action in college admission. If agents are constrained in the side payments they can make, the free market allocation displays excessive segregation relative to the first-best.
More than half of the variation across U.S. school districts in real K-12 education expenditures per student is due to differences between, rather than within, states.
This paper examines how high cost mortgage lending varies by race and ethnicity.
An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11.
We assess the consequences of substantially increasing the marginal tax rate on U.S. top earners using a human capital model.
We study the effects of terrorism in Spain on birth outcomes, focusing on terrorism perpetrated by ETA, combining information on the number of bomb casualties from The Victims of ETA Dataset with the individual birth records from the national registry of live births in Spain, elaborated by the Sp
We demonstrate a striking but previously unnoticed relationship between city size and the black-white wage gap, with the gap increasing by 2.5% for every million-person increase in urban population.
This paper reviews recent literature that considers and explains the tendency for neighborhood and city-level economic status to rise and fall.
We examine the housing market, residential mobility, and academic performance changes that occur soon after a school fails to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) (for the second time) in the Charlotte, NC school district.
This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health.
We estimate the costs of occupational mobility using a novel approach that relies on aggregate flows of workers across occupations rather than on wage data.
This paper develops and applies a Bayesian approach to Exploratory Factor Analysis that improves on ad hoc classical approaches.
We develop a theory of intergenerational preference transmission that rationalizes the choice between parenting styles. Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children.
Countries around the world are adopting market-oriented school choice reforms. Evidence shows that they affect both student and teacher sorting across school sectors. Previous studies have analyzed student and teacher sorting in isolation from each other.
Polarization measures that are used in examining the empirical relationship between ethnic divisions and violent conflict, heavily rely on mechanisms of group identification and often use somewhat arbitrary divisions of a society into ethnic groups.
This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules.
We study the relationship between environmental conditions at birth and adult stature using cohort-state level data in Brazil. We find that GDP per capita in the year of birth, not infant mortality rate, is a robust correlate of population stature in Brazil during the period 1950-1980.
This paper develops and estimates a model with multiple schooling choices that identifies the causal effect of different levels of schooling on health, health-related behaviors, and labor market outcomes.
This paper examines mortgage outcomes for a large, representative sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets in the recent housing boom and bust.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines the impact of high school cohort composition on the educational and labor market outcomes of individuals during their early 20s and again during their late 20s and early 30s.
This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility.
More than low default rates, lenders are interested in the expected return on their loans. In this paper, we consider a number of other measures of repayment and nonpayment that are likely to be of direct interest to lenders.
Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. From this, should we infer that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy?
This paper studies theoretically and empirically the geographic transmission of trade shocks over the territory of a country.
Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot.
This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and noncognitive skills.
We study empirically whether there is scope for parents to shape the economic preferences and attitudes of their children through purposeful investments.
Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children-how they might arise and how they might be remediated.
Female labor supply can insure households against shocks to paternal employment. The paper estimates whether the female labor supply response to a paternal employment shock differs by eligibility to maternity employment protection.
In his seminal book, The Enlightened Economy, Joel Mokyr argued that "in Britain the high quality of workmanship available to support innovation, local and imported, helped create the Industrial Revolution".
We draw on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell's widely cited manual for prospective apprentices, The London Tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship in mid-eighteenth century London to market forces of supply and demand.
We explore the relationship between agency and hedonic and evaluative dimensions of well-being, using data from the Gallup World Poll. We posit that individuals emphasize one well-being dimension over the other, depending on their agency.
We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex-ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies and worker-firm matches evolve stochastically over time.
In this paper we document the main features of the distributions of wages, earnings, consumption and wealth in Japan since the early 1980s using four main data sources: the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), the National Survey of Family Income
This paper compares partial and general equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation.
Conventional methods for mediation analysis generate biased results when the mediator-outcome relationship depends on the treatment condition.
Haavelmo's seminal 1943 paper is the first rigorous treatment of causality. In it, he distinguished the definition of causal parameters from their identification.
The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects.
This paper presents an econometric mediation analysis. It considers identification of production functions and the sources of output effects (treatment effects) from experimental interventions when some inputs are mismeasured and others are entirely omitted.
We discuss a simple model in which parents and children make investments in the children’s education, investments for other purposes, and parents can transfer cash to their children.
This paper examines the impact of the decline in maternal mortality on fertility and women's human capital. Fertility theory suggests that a permanent decline in maternal mortality initially increases fertility and generates a permanent rise in women's human capital, relative to men.
The unemployment gender gap, defined as the difference between female and male unemployment rates, was positive until 1980. This gap virtually disappeared after 1980, except during recessions when men's unemployment rate always exceeds women's.
Fertility in the United States rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts.
This paper analyzes the effectiveness of three different types of education policies: tuition subsidies (broad based, merit based, and flat tuition), grant subsidies (broad based and merit based), and loan limit restrictions.
In this paper we utilize a model of household investments in the cognitive development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child cognitive outcomes in target populations.
Using recently available large-sample micro data from 36 countries, we document that experience-earnings profiles are flatter in poor countries than in rich countries.
This paper investigates the role of early life adversity and home resources in terms of competence formation and school achievement based on data from an epidemiological cohort study following 364 children from birth to adolescence.
In this paper I propose and estimate a dynamic model of education, borrowing, and work decisions of high school graduates.
Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and bulimia nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder.
We estimate dynamic models of elder-care arrangements using data from the Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old Survey.
In this paper we explore a serious eating disorder, bulimia nervosa (BN), which afflicts a surprising number of girls in the US.
The federal government makes subsidized federal financing for higher education widely available. The extent of the subsidy varies over time with interest rate and credit market conditions.
We analyze, theoretically and quantitatively, the interactions between two different forms of unsecured credit and their implications for default behavior of young U.S. households. One type of credit mimics credit cards in the U.S.
This paper describes and analyzes research on the dynamics of long-term care and suggests directions for the literature to make progress.
There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions.
Behavioral economics has shaken the view that individuals have well-defined, consistent and stable preferences. This raises a challenge for welfare economics, which takes as a key postulate that individual preferences should be respected.
This paper posits a notion of the value of an individual's human capital and the associated return on human capital. These concepts are examined using U.S. data on male earnings and financial asset returns.
This paper exploits a unique ongoing experiment to analyze the effects of early rearing conditions on physical and mental health in a sample of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).
A wide body of research explores gender differences in welfare outcomes, and their implications for economic development. We aim to contribute to this work by looking at differences in reported well-being (happiness) across genders around the world.
Experts have long believed that the high economic returns on sound early childhood programs means it should be possible to pay for such programs with so-called "invest-in-kid bonds", a form of social impact finance that would pay income and repay invested capital from the proceeds of the economic
While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the children's own investments.
We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor.
Objectives: Investigate how different model assumptions have driven the conflicting findings in the literature on the deterrence effect of capital punishment.
Schools that enroll disproportionately high percentages of pupils from low-income families are widely believed to have negative consequences for student performance.
Variance in academic performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that whether students fail or thrive depends not only on circumstance, but also on relatively stable individual differences in how children respond to circumstance.
I develop and estimate a structural equilibrium model of the college market. Students, having heterogeneous abilities and preferences, make college application decisions, subject to uncertainty and application costs.
The inverted U shape of the lifetime wage profile is frequently taken to be a stylized fact. This implies a smooth decline in wages as workers approach retirement.
The Abecedarian Approach is a suite of teaching and learning strategies that were developed for the Abecedarian Studies (the Abecedarian Project, CARE, and IHDP), three longitudinal investigations to test the power of high quality early childhood services to improve the later academic achievement
This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth cohorts (NLSY79 and NLSY97) to estimate changes in the effects of ability and family income on educational attainment for youth in their late teens during the early 1980s and early 2000s.
The present paper develops a theoretical model of labor supply with domestic production. It is shown that the structural components of the model can be identified without using a distribution factor, thereby generalizing the initial results of Apps and Rees (1997) and Chiappori (1997).
Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption.
Predicting group decisions with uncertain outcomes involves the empirically difficult task of disentangling individual decision makers' beliefs and preferences over outcomes' states from the group's decision rule.
Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights.
This paper provides a theory that explains the cross-country distribution of average years of schooling, as well as the so called human capital premium puzzle.
This paper tests whether the correlation between wages and the spatial concentration of employment can be explained by unobserved worker productivity differences.
We estimate dynamic models of elder-care arrangements using data from the Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old Survey.
To design studies that fill gaps in existing knowledge and build on innovations in research and practice, international early childhood researchers studying interventions and policies targeting early childhood development (ECD) need to sort quickly through the existing evidence.
This concept paper proposes a four-stage approach to in-country/region ECD program development, selection, and inquiry designed to build the evidence base required to guide program and policy decisions. The foundation of the approach is a strengths-based continuous program improvement framework.
The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes.
This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements.
The classical version of early development by psychoanalysis has been largely challenged by developmental psychology, and particularly by attachment theory.
In this chapter, we articulate a developmental perspective on personality traits from early childhood through adulthood.
We develop a human capital model with borrowing constraints explicitly derived from government student loan (GSL) programs and private lending under limited commitment.
This study examines cognitive and non-cognitive skills and their transmission from parents to children as one potential candidate to explain the intergenerational link of socio-economic status.
Past estimates of the effect of family income on child development have often been plagued by endogeneity and measurement error. In this paper, we use an instrumental variables strategy to estimate the causal effect of income on children's math and reading achievement.
Italy has the lowest labor force participation of women among OECD countries. Moreover, the participation rate of married women is positively correlated to their husbands' income.
Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime?
In a predominantly low-income population-based longitudinal sample of 1,292 children followed from birth, higher level of salivary cortisol assessed at ages 7, 15, and 24 months was uniquely associated with lower executive function ability and to a lesser extent IQ at age 3 years.
We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement.
We develop a matching model on the marriage market, where individuals have preferences over the smoking status of potential mates, and over their socioeconomic quality.
This paper derives the value and the risk of aggregate human capital in a dynamic equilibrium production model with Duffie-Epstein preferences.
Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time.
The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups.
Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less over their careers, hold more junior positions, and exit the occupation at a faster rate. We compiled a large panel data set on executives and formed a career hierarchy to analyze mobility and compensation rates.
We construct a matching model on the marriage market along more than one characteristic, where individuals have preferences over physical attractiveness and socioeconomic characteristics that can be summarized by a one-dimensional index combining these various attributes.
Researchers typically examine peer effects by defining the peer group broadly (all classmates, schoolmates, neighbors) because of the lack of friendship information in many data sources as well as to enable the use of plausibly exogenous variation in peer group composition across cohorts in the s
In this paper we make a (very) preliminary assessment of the ability of a version of the neoclassical growth model to explain episodes of fast growth, as well as instances of economic stagnation.
At the end of the 1960s, the U.S. divorce laws underwent major changes and the divorce rate more than doubled in all of the states.
This paper presents a model of human capital accumulation that allows for feedback effects between the consequences and the likelihood of suffering from particular diseases and the decisions to invest in knowledge, both in the form of schooling and on-the-job training.
Parental beliefs, recognised by child psychologists as a causal influence on early development, are incorporated into a two-period model of human capital accumulation.
There is growing state and national attention on addressing the achievement gap and increasing reading proficiency by 3rd grade.
Using a sequential model of educational choices, we investigate the effect of educational choices on labor market, health, and social outcomes. Unobserved endowments drive the correlations in unobservables across choice and outcome equations.
Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. There is a large literature on the effects of these programs on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development.
This paper examines the early origins of observed health disparities by education. We determine the role played by cognitive, noncognitive and early health endowments, and we identify the causal effect of education on health and health-related behaviors.
Measures of real consumption based upon the ownership of durable goods, the quality of housing, the health and mortality of children, the education of youth and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub-Saharan living standards have, for the past two decades, been growing a
We show that the age structure of human capital matters for economic growth. This question had not been tackled empirically until very recently due to the lack of comparable cross-country data on agespecific educational attainment.
In this paper, we begin by documenting substantial variation in house price growth across neighborhoods within a city during city wide housing price booms.
This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 6 percentage points in the college premium.