In an important and provocative paper, `Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?', Angrist and Krueger use quarter of birth as an instrument for educational attainment in wage equations. To support a causal interpretation of their estimates, they argue that compulsory...

This paper synthesizes economic insights from theoretical models of schooling choice based on individual benefits and econometric work interpreting instrumental variables estimates as weighted averages of individual-specific causal effects. Linkages are illustrated using college proximity to...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental...

Although there is an extensive literature on the determinants of child labor and many initiatives aimed at combating it, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labor on socio-economic outcomes such as education, wages, and health. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor...

This paper studies factor substitution in one important sector: the nursing home industry. Specifically, we measure the extent to which nursing homes substitute materials for labor when labor becomes relatively more expensive. From a policy perspective, factor substitution in this market is...

For much of the 20th century, British students were tracked into higher-track (for the "top" 20%) or lower-track (for the rest) secondary schools. Opponents of tracking contend that the lower-track schools in these systems will inevitably provide low-quality education. In this paper I examine...

We develop a theory of the market for individual reputation, an indicator of regard by one's peers and others. The central questions are: 1) Does the quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of their quality? and 2) Assuming that overall quality matters for reputation, does the quality...

The Mincer earnings function is the cornerstone of a large literature in empirical economics. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of the Mincer model and examines the empirical support for it using data from Decennial Censuses and Current Population Surveys. While data from 1940 and...

We propose a test for the identifying assumptions invoked in designs based on random assignment to one of many "judges.'' We show that standard identifying assumptions imply that the conditional expectation of the outcome given judge assignment is a continuous function with bounded slope of the...