We study the impact of child labor standards in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) on a variety of child labor market outcomes, including employment, education, and household inequality. We develop a stylized general equilibrium model of child labor in an economy open to international trade and...

We study the impacts of a policy designed to reward mothers who stay at home rather than join the labor force when their children are under age three. We use regional and over time variation to show that the Finnish Home Care Allowance (HCA) decreases maternal employment in both the short and...

Children spend years in foster care, and there are concerns that bureaucratic hurdles contribute to unnecessarily long stays. In a novel approach to policy making, the Chilean government randomized the introduction of a program aimed at reducing these delays in order to evaluate its effects on...

We examine the effects of an unconditional cash transfer on the economic wellbeing (material hardship, ability to meet needs, money on hand, use of friends and family for assistance, and employment) of families and children with very low incomes. We use a parameterized difference-in-differences...

This paper uses the severe economic crisis in Turkey in 2008 as a quasi-experiment to evaluate the impact of worsening economic conditions during pregnancy on birth outcomes. Exploiting the temporal and spatial variations in economic hardship across provinces, we show that the deep economic...

Children's indirect exposure to the justice system through biological parents or co-resident adults is both a marker of their own vulnerability and a measure of the justice system's expansive reach in society. Estimating the size of this population for the United States has historically been...

This paper formalizes the principle that persecution power of government may generate violent contests over it. We show that this principle yields a large set of theoretical insights on different separation-of-powers institutions that can help to preempt such contests under different...

The causal effects of fertility are a central focus in the social sciences, but the analysis is challenged by the endogeneity of fertility choices. Earlier work has proposed several "natural experiments" from twin births or gender composition of earlier births to assess whether having more...

We use novel and unique survey data from Italy to shed light on key questions regarding the measurement of social capital and the use of social capital indicators for empirical work. Our data cover a sample of over 600,000 respondents interviewed between 2000 and 2015. We identify four distinct...