Introduction: what have we learned about the problems of and prospects for disadvantaged youth? / Jonathan Gruber -- Education : the behavioral consequences of pre-kindergarten participation for disadvantaged youth / David Figlio and Jeffrey Roth -- Is gaining access to selective elementary...

Societies socialize children about sex. This is done in the presence of peer-group effects, which may encourage undesirable behavior. Parents want the best for their children. Still, they weigh the marginal gains from socializing their children against its costs. Churches and states may...

Do studies of time use interfere too much in the lives of the subjects? As a result are those who agree to participate a biased sample of the population? We examine the characteristics of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) adolescent sample from the Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social...

Scholars emphasize that poverty in Britain has risen sharply since the late 1970s. Meanwhile in the United States, both official figures and traditional poverty scholars report sharp declines in poverty. We seek to provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of...

In 2008, Uganda granted hundreds of small groups $400/person to help members start individual skilled trades. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised earnings by 38% (Blattman, Fiala, Martinez 2014). We return after 9 years to find these start-up grants acted more as a...

This paper examines whether participation in religious or other social organizations can help offset the negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged environment. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, we collect measures of disadvantage as well as parental involvement with...

Both early teen marriage and dropping out of high school have historically been associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty rates throughout life. Are these negative outcomes due to pre-existing differences or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and...

We estimate the causal effect of parental incarceration on children's medium-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in parental incarceration from the random assignment of criminal defendants to judges with different incarceration...

Are smarter machines our children's friends? Or can they bring about a transfer from our relatively unskilled children to ourselves that leaves our children and, indeed, all our descendants - worse off?