Using cross-sectional data files for the United States we show that difficulties experienced in childhood - so-called Adverse Child Experiences (ACE)s - are strongly and significantly associated with mental health in adulthood. Our evidence is taken from eight Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance...

School choice lotteries are an important tool for allocating access to high-quality and oversubscribed public schools. While prior evidence suggests that winning a school lottery decreases adult criminality, there is little evidence for how school choice lotteries impact non-lottery students who...

Although yet to be clearly identified as a clinical condition, there is immense concern at the health and wellbeing consequences of long COVID. Using data collected from nearly half a million Americans in the period June 2022-December 2022 in the US Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey (HPS),...

We exploit a panel of city-level data with rich demographic information to estimate the distributional effects of Department of Defense spending and its effects on a range of social outcomes. The income generated by defense spending accrues predominantly to households without a bachelor's...

We examine the effect of attending stand-alone technical high schools on the industry of employment and within industry earnings premiums using a regression discontinuity design. We study the universe of students that applied to the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System (CTECS)...

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. Virtually all studies...

Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive affect measures - life satisfaction, enjoyment,...

Across many studies subjective well-being follows a U-shape in age, declining until people reach middle-age, only to rebound subsequently. Ill-being follows a mirror-imaged hump-shape. But this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in illbeing by age. The reason for the...

The post-COVID price surge has reignited interest in inflation's impact on American households. Even if anticipated and with full market adjustments, inflation affects households through its interaction with the fiscal system, which is the focus of this paper. Inflation affects households...