Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills matter to understand a child's opportunities and outcomes in adulthood. However, it is unclear how non-cognitive skills are acquired and what the role played by household investments is in this process. Motivated by suggestions from the medical literature...

On January 1, 1991, the federal excise tax on beer doubled, and the tax rates on wine and liquor increased as well. These changes are larger than the typical state-level changes that have been used to study the effect of price on alcohol abuse and its consequences. In this paper, we develop a...

We estimate the effect of binge drinking on accident and emergency attendances, road accidents, arrests, and the number of police officers on duty using a variety of unique data from Britain and a two-sample minimum distance estimation procedure. Our estimates, which reveal sizeable effects of...

We estimate the effect of binge drinking on accident and emergency attendances, road accidents, arrests, and the number of police officers on duty using a variety of unique data from Britain and a two-sample minimum distance estimation procedure. Our estimates, which reveal sizeable effects of...

Community traumatic events such as mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural or man-made disasters have the potential to disrupt student learning in numerous ways. For example, these events can reduce instructional time by causing teacher and student absences, school closures, and...

Community traumatic events such as mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural or man-made disasters have the potential to disrupt student learning in numerous ways. For example, these events can reduce instructional time by causing teacher and student absences, school closures, and...

In this paper data from a survey of 1,771 inmates conducted in 31 German prisons provide microeconometric evidence on the relationship between individual anticipated labour market opportunities and the perceived probability of future recidivism. Results show that inmates with poor labour market...

Recent work documents that better legal institutions are associated with broader equity markets. We investigate whether international differences in legal institutions also help explain the international cross-section of expected stock returns. We document three main regularities. First, total...

We study the emergence and interaction of red tape and corruption in a principal-bureaucrat-agent hierarchy. The principal is to provide the agent with a unit of a good that involves externalities so that market mechanisms fail to achieve first best. Red tape partially solves the problem. While...

The positive correlation between gun prevalence and homicide rates has been widely documented. But does this correlation reflect a causal relationship? This study seeks to answer the question of whether more guns cause more crime, and unlike nearly all previous such studies, we properly account...