Working Papers

Networks

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education.

Federal financial aid depends on a student's Expected Family Contribution (EFC)--the higher her EFC, the less aid she receives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We evaluate the impacts of adopting algorithmic predictions of future offending(risk assessments) as an aid to judicial discretion in felony sentencing.

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.

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.

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.

A persistent public-private sector difference in returns to skills is one sign that Vietnam’s transition from command to market economy remains incomplete.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We provide the first evidence on the relationship between disability programs and markers of financial distress: bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, and home sale.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Just as there are good and bad workers, there are also good and bad employers that will opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, or laws.

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.

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.

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 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).

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 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.

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).

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.

This paper provides the introduction to the special issue on Race and the City in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The paper explores the consequences for inequality of the joint evolution, endogenous or exogenous, of social connections and human capital investments.

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.

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.

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 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 studies theoretically and empirically the geographic transmission of trade shocks over the territory of a country.

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

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.

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

Objectives: Investigate how different model assumptions have driven the conflicting findings in the literature on the deterrence effect of capital punishment.

This paper tests whether the correlation between wages and the spatial concentration of employment can be explained by unobserved worker productivity differences.

This paper derives the value and the risk of aggregate human capital in a dynamic equilibrium production model with Duffie-Epstein preferences.

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.