The foundations for successful child development are established in early childhood. Two main policy approaches for strengthening these foundations have been subsidized preschool programs and programs targeting the home environment. Our chapter reviews a large body of empirical work...

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be...

Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven challenging due to data availability and correlated unobservables. This paper overcomes these challenges in the context of Norway's criminal justice system, offering new insights into how...

Why do individuals choose different types of post-secondary education, and what are the labor market consequences of those choices? We show that answering these questions is difficult because individuals choose between several unordered alternatives. Even with a valid instrument for every type...

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...

Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long-standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a...