We present a comprehensive evaluation of the health impacts of the introduction and expansion of a large non-contributory health insurance program in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP). SP provided access to health services without co-pays to individuals with no Social Security protection.

Modeling and inference are central to most areas of science and especially to evolving and complex systems.

The principle of maximum entropy, developed more than six decades ago, provides a systematic approach to modeling inference, and data analysis grounded in the principles of information theory, Bayesian probability and constrained optimization.

This article 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.

Inequality in family wealth is high, yet we know little about how much and how wealth inequality is maintained across generations.

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation.

A negative relationship between income and fertility has persisted for so long that its existence is often taken for granted. One economic theory builds on this relationship and argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility between rich and poor.

We evaluate the Reggio Approach using non-experimental data on individuals from the cities of Reggio Emilia, Parma and Padova belonging to one of five age cohorts: ages 50, 40, 30, 18, and 6 as of 2012.

The goal of this chapter is to summarize current knowledge about the development of individual differences in temperament and personality from childhood through adulthood. The chapter is divided into seven sections.

In this article, we provide novel survey evidence on middle schoolers' knowledge and on how such knowledge evolves in the process of high school track choice.

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.

Undernutrition remains one of the most pressing global health challenges today, contributing to nearly half of all deaths in children under five years of age.

We find using laboratory experiments that primes that make religion salient cause subjects to identify more with their religion and affect their economic choices. The effect on choices varies by religion.

The English structural transformation from farming to manufacturing was accompanied by rapid technological change, expansion of trade, and massive population growth.

Public policy in modern India features affirmative action programs intended to reduce inequality that stems from a centuries-old caste structure and history of disparate treatment by gender.

Predicting group decisions under uncertainty requires disentangling individual members' utilities over the consequences of choice, their expectations for uncertain outcomes, and their choice process as a group.

Understanding the exact connection between inequality and justice is important because justice is classically regarded as the first line of defense against self-interest and inequality.

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps caseworkers who represent children in Pennsylvania's child welfare system by recommending prospective families for adoption.

In this paper we compute the optimal tax and education policy transition in an economy where progressive taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk, but distort the education decision of households. Optimally chosen tertiary education subsidies mitigate these distortions.

n this article, we consider the collection of novel subjective data on family processes of schooling decisions.

Importance: Children living in poverty generally perform poorly in school, with markedly lower standardized test scores and lower educational attainment. The longer children live in poverty, the greater their academic deficits.

Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008) (MR) argued that changing selection of working females on unobservable characteristics, from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s, accounted for nearly the entire closing of the gender wage gap.

We investigate how reduction of income inequality through tax policy affects economic growth. Taxation at different points of the income distribution has heterogeneous impacts on households' incentives to invest, work, and consume. Using U.S.

In this paper we develop a formal model to represent effects of early life conditions with delayed health impacts on old age mortality. The model captures several mechanisms through which early conditions influence adult health and mortality.

This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and fostering cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

The probability of dropping out of high school varies considerably with parental education. Using a rich Canadian panel data set, we examine the channels determining this socioeconomic status effect.

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.

Patience and self-control are important non-cognitive skills that are associated with favorable educational, economic and social outcomes.

We examine the extent to which tuition and needs-based aid policies explain important differences in the relationship between family income and post-secondary attendance relationships between Canada and the U.S.

In this paper, we ask whether variation in preference anomalies is related to variation in cognitive ability.

There is a large and growing literature on peer effects, but much less is known about the role of friendships and social relationships in student outcomes. The best evidence on the mechanisms behind aggregate peer effects suggests an important role for discipline and disruption.

We study efficient allocations and optimal policies in a Mirrleesean life-cycle economy with risky human capital accumulation and permanent ability differences. We assume that ability, labor supply, learning effort and returns to human capital are all private information of the agents.

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) predicts executive function performance and measures of prefrontal cortical function, but little is known about its anatomical correlates.

The parenting gap is a big factor in the opportunity gap. The chances of upward social mobility are lower for children with parents struggling to do a good job - in terms of creating a supportive and stimulating home environment.

This highlights booklet provides a summary of HCEO's activities.

This highlights booklet provides a summary of HCEO's activities.

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490.

My focus is on the degree to which increasing inequality in the high-income countries, particularly in the United States, is likely to limit economic mobility for the next generation of young adults.

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe's, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century.

Several frictions restrict the government’s ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets.

Adolescents are often resistant to interventions that reduce aggression in children. At the same time, they are developing stronger beliefs in the fixed nature of personal characteristics, particularly aggression. The present intervention addressed these beliefs.

To advance an intraindividual life-span approach to the issue of stability and change, we studied personality trait trajectories in adulthood.

Married men engage in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men, but it is not clear whether this reflects a causal relationship.

Recent decades have witnessed a double movement within the field of crime control characterized by the prison boom and intensive policing, on the one hand, and widespread implementation of new approaches that assign policing responsibilities to non-police actors, on the other.

At the end of the 1960s, the U.S. divorce law underwent major changes and the divorce rate almost doubled in all of the states.

Human capital is one of the largest assets in the economy and in theory may play an important role for asset pricing. Human capital is heterogeneous across investors. One source of heterogeneity is industry affiliation.

Research suggests that child maltreatment predicts juvenile violence, but it is uncertain whether the effects of victimization persist into adulthood or differ across gender. Furthermore, we know little about the mechanisms underlying the victim–perpetrator cycle for males and females.

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes.

Lower socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with higher levels of life stress, which in turn affect stress physiology. SES is related to basal cortisol and diurnal change, but it is not clear if SES is associated with cortisol reactivity to stress.

Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them.

Higher prior exposure to water-borne lead among male World War Two U.S. Army enlistees was associated with lower intelligence test scores. Exposure was proxied by urban residence and the water pH levels of the cities where enlistees lived in 1930.

Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them.

Adolescents engage in a wide range of risky behaviors that their older peers shun, and at an enormous cost. Despite being older, stronger, and healthier than children, adolescents face twice the risk of mortality and morbidity faced by their younger peers.

Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? In this paper we use microdata from the International Adult Literacy Survey to show that the effect of skill dispersion on trade flows is quantitatively similar to that of the aggregate endowment of human capital.

We construct a marriage market model of matching along multiple dimensions, some of which are unobservable, in which individual preferences can be summarized by a one-dimensional index combining the various characteristics.

Would people choose what they think would maximize their subjective well-being (SWB)? We present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and predicted SWB rankings of two alternatives.

We examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi-community model with mobile and heterogeneous households and with flexible housing supplies.

Combining statistical and ethnographic analyses, this article explores the prevalence and ramifications of eviction in the lives of the urban poor.

Socioeconomic disparities in childhood are associated with remarkable differences in cognitive and socio-emotional development during a time when dramatic changes are occurring in the brain.

We discuss a simple model in which parents and children make investments in the children's education and investments for other purposes and parents can transfer cash to their children.

Sociologists long have observed that the urban poor rely on kinship networks to survive economic destitution.

We review studies of the impact of credit constraints on the accumulation of human capital. Evidence suggests that credit constraints are increasingly important for schooling and other aspects of households' behavior.

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime?

This report is the second in a Series on early child development in low-income and middle-income countries and assesses the effectiveness of early child development interventions, such as parenting support and preschool enrolment.

The relative lack of attention to early childhood development in many developing countries remains a puzzle, and an opportunity. There is increasing evidence that investments in the nutritional, cognitive, and socio-emotional development of young children have high payoffs.

This paper quantitatively analyzes the stability and breakup of nations.

This paper quantitatively analyzes the stability and breakup of nations.

To be successful takes creativity, flexibility, self-control, and discipline. Central to all those are executive functions, including mentally playing with ideas, giving a considered rather than an impulsive response, and staying focused.

Within the inferential context of predicting a distribution of potential outcomes P[y(t)] under a uniform treatment assignment t in T, this paper deals with partial identification of the alpha-quantile of the distribution of interest Q_alpha[y(t)] under relatively weak and credible monotonicity-t

In a heterogeneous life cycle economy with human capital accumulation, the option to discharge student loans under a liquidation regime helps alleviate

Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” social-psychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps eve

OBJECTIVE: An estimated 178 million children younger than 5 years in developing countries experience linear growth retardation and are unlikely to attain their developmental potential.

Wage ratios between different percentiles of the wage distribution have moved in parallel and then diverged in the U.S. in the last 50 years. In this paper, I study the theoretical response of wage ratios to skill-biased technical change and trade integration.

A brief intervention aimed at buttressing college freshmen's sense of social belonging in school was tested in a randomized controlled trial (N=92), and its academic and health-related consequences over 3 years are reported.

A brief intervention aimed at buttressing college freshmen's sense of social belonging in school was tested in a randomized controlled trial (N=92), and its academic and health-related consequences over 3 years are reported.

Policy-makers are considering large-scale programs aimed at self-control to improve citizens’ health and wealth and reduce crime. Experimental and economic studies suggest such programs could reap benefits.

We develop a human capital model with borrowing constraints explicitly derived from government student loan (GSL) programs and private lending under limited commitment.

We find that about 40% of a cohort of young Canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked, and 6%-9% have the same employer in adulthood.

The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual-level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within-household inequality.

This monograph describes research findings linking intelligence and personality traits with health outcomes, including health behaviors, morbidity, and mortality.

We find that about 40% of a cohort of young Canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked, and 6%-9% have the same employer in adulthood.

If we want the best academic outcomes, the most efficient and cost-effective route to achieve that is, counterintuitively, not to narrowly focus on academics, but to also address children's social, emotional, and physical development.

Human brain development occurs within a socioeconomic context and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) influences neural development, particularly the systems subserving language and executive function.

Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. In practice, initial randomization plans are almost always compromised. Multiple hypotheses are frequently tested.

Neuroscience is contributing to an understanding of the biological bases of human intelligence differences. This work is principally being conducted along two empirical fronts: genetics — quantitative and molecular — and brain imaging.

The federal government makes low-cost financing for higher education widely available through its fast-growing student loan programs.

We present a neural network model that aims to bridge the historical gap between dynamic and structural approaches to personality.

We study the structure of optimal wedges and capital taxes in a dynamic Mirrlees economy with endogenous distribution of skills. Human capital is a private, stochastic state variable that drives the skill process of each individual.

We develop a general stochastic model of directed search on the job. Directed search allows us to focus on a Block Recursive Equilibrium (BRE) where agents' value functions, policy functions and market tightness do not depend on the distribution of workers over wages and unemployment.

The effects of early life experience on later brain structure and function have been studied extensively in animals, yet the relationship between childhood experience and normal brain development in humans remains largely unknown.

We estimate a principal-agent model of moral hazard with longitudinal data on firms and managerial compensation over two disjoint periods spanning 60 years to investigate increased value and variability in managerial compensation.

This paper investigates the effect of linguistic diversity on redistribution in a broad cross-section of countries. We use the notion of “linguistic distances” and show that the commonly used fractionalization index, which ignores linguistic distances, yields insignificant results.

Background: Better early childhood nutrition improves schooling, adult health, skills, and wages, but there is little evidence regarding

Children enter kindergarten with disparate rudimentary reading and mathematics skills; capabilities for paying attention, sitting still and making friends; mental health; and inclinations for aggressive behavior.

Studies have shown that higher levels of neuroticism are associated with greater risk of mortality. Yet what accounts for this association?

The serotonin system is a collection of neural pathways whose overall level of functioning (from low to high) relates to diverse kinds of psychological and behavioral variability.

"Using a longitudinal survey from rural Guatemala, we examine the effect of an early childhood nutritional intervention on adult educational outcomes.

"Using a longitudinal survey from rural Guatemala, we examine the effect of an early childhood nutritional intervention on adult educational outcomes.

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with cognitive achievement throughout life. How does SES relate to brain development, and what are the mechanisms by which SES might exert its influence?

Improving the quality of Early Childhood Education has been a priority in Brazil, but it is still a challenging issue to be faced.

I quantify the effects of alternative student loan policies on college enrollment, borrowing behavior, and default rates in a heterogeneous model of life-cycle earnings and human capital accumulation.

I quantify the effects of alternative student loan policies on college enrollment, borrowing behavior, and default rates in a heterogeneous model of life-cycle earnings and human capital accumulation.

North Korea has survived the breakdown of the communist bloc and has been immune to the democratization process of the 1990s. In spite of national famines and economic collapse, the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang maintains a firm grip on its power.

Background: Substantial, but indirect, evidence suggests that improving nutrition in early childhood in developing countries is a long-term economic investment. We investigated the direct effect of a nutrition intervention in early childhood on adult economic productivity.

Background: Substantial, but indirect, evidence suggests that improving nutrition in early childhood in developing countries is a long-term economic investment. We investigated the direct effect of a nutrition intervention in early childhood on adult economic productivity.

This article instead argues that information about inequalities in health across individuals as opposed to information about social group health differences is generally of little use to egalitarians.

A exploratory workshop was held to consider what could be gained by adding genetic analyses to attempts to understand economic behavior.

Previous studies have indicated that high neuroticism is associated with early mortality. However, recent work suggests that people's level of neuroticism changes over long periods of time. We hypothesized that such changes in trait neuroticism affect mortality risk.

In intelligence investigations, such as those into reports of chemical- or biological-weapons (CBW) use, evidence may be difficult to assemble and, once assembled, to weigh.

Many children younger than 5 years in developing countries are exposed to multiple risks, including poverty, malnutrition, poor health, and unstimulating home environments, which detrimentally affect their cognitive, motor, and social-emotional development.

This paper is the third in the Child Development Series. The first paper showed that more than 200 million children under 5 years of age in developing countries do not reach their developmental potential.

Inequality is a contentious topic in economics, and its effects on individual welfare remains an open questions. We address it from the perspective of the economics of happiness. We draw from our research on the topic, based on new empirical evidence for Latin America.

This chapter focuses on individual differences in personality, because differences among individuals are the most remarkable feature of human nature. After all, in both genetic and cultural evolution, selection pressures operate on differences among people.

Reducing the incidence of low birth weight not only lowers infant mortality rates but also has multiple benefits over the life cycle.

We examine the importance of family background for early childhood development (ECD) using data collected in 2001 from 3,556 children ages 0-36 months in three regions of the Philippines.

This paper considers the impact of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA), a large Mexican rural anti-poverty programme that had an evaluation sample in which overall treatment was randomly assigned to some communities but not others, on child nutrition.

From 1991 to 1994, a group of Romanian and American colleagues undertook an experimental and humanitarian effort to try to improve the quality of life, mental health, and developmental progress of young children in a Romanian orphanage.

We use data on monozygotic twins to obtain improved estimates of the effect of intrauterine nutrient intake on adult health and earnings and thus to evaluate the efficacy of programs aimed at increasing birthweight.

Nonexperimental data are used to evaluate impacts of a Bolivian preschool program on cognitive, psychosocial, and anthropometric outcomes. Impacts are shown to be highly dependent on age and exposure duration.

Recent calls for wage subsidies have emphasized their value for attaching low-skill persons to the workplace, attracting them away from lives of idleness or crime (Phelps, 1997; Heckman, Lochner, Smith and Taber, 1997; and Lochner, 1998).

This paper considers how identity, a person's sense of self, affects economic outcomes. We incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior.

This paper constructs a tractable general equilibrium model of search with risk aversion. An increase in risk aversion reduces wages, unemployment, and investment. Unemployment insurance has the opposite effect: insured workers seek high‐wage jobs with high unemployment risk.

A multimethod, multisource assessment of impulsivity was conducted in a sample of more than 400 boys who were members of a longitudinal study of the development of antisocial behavior.