Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

In 1973, the Indonesian government began one of the largest school construction programs ever. We use 2016 nationally representative data to examine the long-term and intergenerational effects of additional schooling as a child. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy...

This paper uses newly available Chinese micro data to estimate the return to college education for late 20th century China when allowing for heterogeneous returns among individuals selecting into schooling based on these differences. We use recently developed semiparametric methods to identify...

This paper uses factor models to identify and estimate distributions of counterfactuals. We extend LISREL frameworks to a dynamic treatment effect setting, extending matching to account for unobserved conditioning variables. Using these models, we can identify all pairwise and joint treatment...

Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian Government constructed over 61,000 primary schools throughout the country. This is one of the largest school construction programs on record. I evaluate the effect of this program on education and wages by combining differences across regions in the number...

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...

Researchers and policy makers are often interested in estimating how treatments or policy interventions affect the outcomes of those most in need of help. This concern has motivated the increasingly common practice of disaggregating experimental data by groups constructed on the basis of an...

High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing...

We examine the effects WWII Lanham Act Nursery Schools (LNS) on high school and young adult educational and labor outcomes of participants in the landmark Project Talent (PT) study. All PT places that received funding for LNS schools and all PT places that did not were identified by examining...