Teacher quality is a key factor in improving student academic achievement. As such, educational policymakers strive to design systems to hire the most effective teachers. This paper examines the effects of a national policy reform in Colombia that established a merit-based teacher-hiring system...

This paper provides evidence from a natural experiment on the importance of workers' tacit knowledge about firms' intangible assets for competition in product and labor markets. Evidence is presented on product and labor market imperfections across manufacturing and services firms in the...

We develop a model of college major selection in an environment where firms and students have incomplete information about the student's aptitude. Students must choose from a continuum of majors which differ in their human capital production function and can act as a signal to the market....

Drawing on a comprehensive compilation of quantile shares and inequality measures for 34 countries, including over 5,600 estimated Gini coefficients, we review the measurement of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last seven decades. We find that there is quite a bit...

We leverage rich data from a prominent online job board in Uruguay to assess directed search patterns in job applications, focusing on posted wages and advertised non-wage amenities. We find robust evidence of directed search based on posted wages in the cross-section, with stark heterogeneity...

This paper proposes a new method to estimate quantile regressions with multiple fixed effects. The method, which expands on the strategy proposed by Machado and Santos Silva (2019), allows for the inclusion of multiple fixed effects and provides various alternatives for estimating standard...

The Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC), a tax credit based on income and child care expenses, reduces child care costs for working families. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act expanded the CDCC in 2003, generating differential increases in generosity across states and...

Drawing on nationally representative UK data, we explore the association of parental health and disability with mental distress and non-cognitive skills development of adolescents; both self-reported and more objectively measured bio-measures are used to capture parental health. Overall, we...

This paper introduces a novel monthly consumption indicator: the IZA / Fable Data consumption indicator for Germany. It is based on credit card transactions data collected and anonymised by Fable Data from 2017 onwards. We study some of the properties of the data and use a so-called "one year...

We provide a simple distribution regression estimator for treatment effects in the difference-in-differences (DiD) design. Our procedure is particularly useful when the treatment effect differs across the distribution of the outcome variable. Our proposed estimator easily incorporates covariates...